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Things which must be represented, if you want to “span” Physics :

* Newton’s laws (couple gravity in)
* principle of least action
* Maxell’s equations
* entropy
* kT (I mean, is anything more useful for napkin calculations?)
* uncertainty principle
* Shroedinger equation
* e=mc^2 (as a stand-in for all of SR)
* Einstein field equation

Those are just basics. Any of those (except for maybe the last one), and you’ve cut out a big piece of the underpinnings of any undergraduate physics education.

After that, before getting into esoteric stuff that indicates you’ve specialized into any particular subfield, I’d get fluid stuff (continuity &/or euler &/or Navier-Stokes), something potentialish (del-phi, or scalar/vector potentials of E&M, or perhaps the QM SHO), and perhaps a general category of symmetry->conservation laws.

Yeah, no strings anywhere there. There’s also no band gap or fermi genergy, no FRW metric and friedmann equation, no isospin or shell model or Standard Model, no Einstein A/B, no equation of radiative transfer, no stern gerlach or bell’s inequality, no cooper pairs, no phase diagrams, no young’s modulus, no alfven waves, and so forth….

-Rob

P.S. : there’s a whole separate approach one could take:

1. extremely long problem sets
2. fear of the Physics GRE
3. Trial By Jackson
4. eight years of grad school
5. moving every two years jumping between post-docs
6. inability to get a faculty job
7. inability to get tenure
8. constant writing of proposals
9. constant reviewing of huge stacks of proposals
10. colleagues who think your subfield is worthless
11. colleagues in subfields you think is worthless
12. cancellation of your project

but that might be too cynical….

I’ll edge onto the speculative limb - so to speak - and speculate that #12 equals The Maldacena Conjecture on AdS/CFT. Surprisingly though it may sound, strings are at my heart these days…

By the way, is Asymptotia sort of like your beach retreat hovering along the shoreline of the Virtual Sea?;)

Best wishes,
Cynthia

Little doors would open to reveal the exciting equations!

Thanks….

-cvj

I found this over the week-end:

http://lsiit.u-strasbg.fr/sites/img/rendu_fluide.jpg

I thought it was great. It’s probably something like what you were talking about with Navier-Stokes.

Generating function of field theory operators=String theory partition function with appropriate boundary values for fields.

This being the defining equations of AdS/CFT which itself is one of the most exciting outcomes of string theory so far seems appropriate to me.

All the best,

J.

For what it’s worth, assuming that this is for a true `calendar’ my version of that list would have to include topics that can be displayed succinctly. I’d have

1. F = ma
2. The Schroedinger equation
3. M = \sqrt{ Area(S)/16\pi G^2 } (The Penrose inequality)
4. R_{ab} - \frac{1}{2}g_{ab}R \prop T_{ab}
5. The principle of least action
6. Maxwell’s equations
7. E=hv
8. [L_m,L_n] = (m-n)L_{m+n} + A(m)d_{m+n} (Centrally extended Virasoro algebra)
9. The laws of black hole mechanics
10. Stokes’ Theorem
11. Entropy
12. The Navier-Stokes equations

Stefan: As for Nambu-Goto.. that’s a good idea, but it does not really bring out the best… But thn I don’t knwo what does. (Thanks for the book suggestion by the way).

Paul:- The Regge slope is good… that’s very stringy and also has experimental roots.

Helge:- Long time since I’ve heard from you! Hi! KdV - Close to my heart too!

David and TheGraduate:- Navier-Stokes is good too….. also nice to have an image for… lots of nice fluid flows in the background.

I think I know what is top of my list to go next:- Th Planck black body spectrum… it encompasses so namy aspects of physics, bridges the classical and the quantum, and is also written in the sky via cosmology and astrophysics. It is such a triumph, it should be as popular as the I heart NY t-shirt.

-cvj

I was about to write exactly the same thing

Hi Clifford,

What equation belongs to 11) ‘Entropy’? S= k log \Omega ?

Or otherwise, how about including something from Thermodynamics of Black holes: T = 1/M, or S ~ A etc.

And I’d insist on Maxwell’s equations with differential forms, it brings out much better the beauty of it all…

Best,

B.

But for string theory one might like to have the spectrum of string states, or perhaps T-duality. Maybe one could be more general and have a BV master equation, but it wouldn’t look too interesting. Perhaps the density of states formula? Or even the formula relating angular momentum to energy squared featuring the Regge slope? Even some AdS/CFT duality pictures might be good for a calendar, potentially I mean.

Personally I prefer comic calendars, last year my friend brought me a cow calendar: every month had a cow in some exotic location giving warped life-advice always involving a cow, such as, “be nice to your cow and your cow will be nice to you”.

What about some equation describing the motion of a planet around the sun? Kepler’s laws?

Helge

For string theory, it features the Nambu-Goto action, if I remember correctly…