Published on 2024-02-25 12:20 by Sam Wu

Rishabh

One thing that everyone knows but no one thinks about it is that everything that happens throughout the universe happens in such a way that it takes the least amount of energy. Imagine a leaf falls. It’s going to go straight down in the absence of air, of course. But it could have taken any path.

I’m an engineer, so this concept has affected me a lot. When you think about, say, materials shrinking or deforming, it can be used to solve quite a lot of problems. If you want to look at the solid mechanics, we can arrive at those equations by just minimizing the energy. So you can basically come to the constitutive equation, which is what stress is, by minimizing the potential and the kinetic energy. Which I find interesting.

Written by Sam Wu