Quote:
Originally Posted by Fortis
This all seems very arbitrary. Classical mechanics covers motion in a 3 dimensional space. It also includes second rank tensors such as the moment of inertia tensor. General relativity also contains 4 dimensional tensors of rank 1. As for quantum mechanics, it contains scalars (your traditional wave function as per Schrodinger, as well as tensors of rank 2 if you are talking about quantising the electromagnetic field.
Your ordering seems completely arbitrary. How do you justify this?
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Thats difficult to explain. And that may not fit to this thread. But let me try and apologize in advance.
It refers to the numbers used and needed. A field like gravity is following an inverse square law, like the coulomb force. That is a complex quadratic relation and you need quaternions. To describe particles you need three components and octonions to describe them. For classical physics you need only reals or complex numbers.
Or think about space: classical physics uses a vector and that's it. Gr is about curved space and in QM they are researching vacuum fluctuations.