q(x) = xᵀAx looks like a single number, yet the signs of the eigenvalues of A decide the shape of an entire landscape.
When every λᵢ is strictly positive the form lifts every nonzero vector and the graph is a paraboloid that never returns to the plane.
A single zero eigenvalue flattens one direction into a trough; a change of sign twists the same expression into a saddle that rises along one axis and falls along another.
On the grandest scales, galaxies drift apart as the cosmos expands—yet gravity still pulls them into close encounters, collisions, and mergers. Meet NGC 474 in Pisces, sometimes called the Cosmic Blender: a lenticular galaxy wrapped in ghostly shells and streaming tidal tails, the leftover wreckage of a dramatic past interaction. Its spiral companion NGC 470 sits nearby to the right. Both lie about 100 million light-years away.
Credit: CFHT/Coelum.
Brilliant clouds of gas and dust glow against a sea of distant stars, creating a breathtaking view of deep space. 🌌✨
Every colorful layer reveals a region shaped by powerful forces unfolding across the cosmos. 💫
Volumes that remain Euclidean in the small still swell or shrink once they travel along geodesics; the single tensor that records that average distortion is Ricci curvature.
Ricci isolated the contraction from the full Riemann tensor around 1900. In coordinates it is the trace
R_{ij}=R^k_{ikj},
and it already contains enough geometric information to decide whether nearby volumes expand or collapse.
When the metric itself is set in motion by
∂g_{ij}/∂t=-2R_{ij},
the same quantity that measures bending becomes the force that smooths it.
The resulting Ricci flow turns an instantaneous snapshot of curvature into a dynamical process that can dissolve singularities and reveal hidden topology.
"How did you learn so much about space?"
1) Reading about things that interested me
2) Getting my hands dirty doing hard things that taught me what I didn't learn from reading
3) Being wrong on the internet
4) Learning from being wrong on the internet instead of doubling down
Magnetic field lines have neither beginning nor end. Slice a bar magnet and two complete magnets appear; the lines simply close through the fresh faces.
∮ 𝐁⃗ · d𝐀⃗ = 0
The identical surface integral for the electric field equals the enclosed charge, exposing sources and sinks that magnetism has never supplied. Maxwell wrote the magnetic statement into his 1861 paper on physical lines of force, where it stands as one of the four equations that bind electricity and magnetism together.
R136 blazes at the heart of the Tarantula Nebula, packed with some of the most massive young stars known. 🌟
This stellar powerhouse illuminates the surrounding clouds, turning deep space into a spectacular cosmic nursery. ✨
This starry view is one of the largest images released to date from @NASAWebb – and it contains a surprise. Researchers found brown dwarfs twice the mass of Jupiter, which is small for this strange class of cosmic object. https://t.co/6HRYpgegUe
δA = 0, where A = ∫ L(q, q̇, t) dt from t₁ to t₂.
Among every conceivable curve that begins at one event and ends at another, only the actual history of the system leaves this integral stationary.
A first variation that vanishes for all admissible deformations δq immediately yields the Euler–Lagrange equation
d/dt (∂L/∂q̇) − ∂L/∂q = 0.
Hamilton stated the principle in 1834; the same stationarity requirement later became the starting point for fields, relativity and the path integral.