World & Knowledge
Famous Scientific Laws
The rules of reality, in plain words
Novice
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Novice
World & Knowledge
The rules of reality, in plain words
Novice
Subdomain
Maxwell's electromagnetism and Einstein's relativity. The shift from forces in a fixed stage to fields and curved spacetime.
Speed of light as a cosmic speed limit
In vacuum, light travels at a fixed speed c of about 299,792,458 metres per second, the same for every observer regardless of their motion, and no information or matter can travel faster.
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General relativity
Einstein's 1915 theory in which mass and energy curve the four-dimensional fabric of spacetime, and what we experience as gravity is the motion of objects along that curvature.
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Snell's law of refraction
When light passes from one medium to another, the product of the refractive index and the sine of the angle from the normal is conserved.
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Ohm's law
For most conductors at fixed temperature, the current through them is directly proportional to the voltage across them, with resistance as the constant.
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Force
Push or pull that changes motion.
Energy
Capacity to do work; conserved across transformations.
Entropy
Measure of disorder / number of microstates consistent with a macrostate.
Spacetime
The 4D fabric in which all events occur.
Electromagnetic wave
Self-propagating oscillation of electric and magnetic fields, including light.
Natural selection
Mechanism of adaptation via heritable variation + differential survival.
Conservation law
Statement that some quantity (energy, momentum, charge) is preserved across transformations.
Quantum
Discrete unit; the framework where particles behave probabilistically at small scales.
Power law
Relationship where one quantity varies as a power of another, producing heavy tails.
Bayes' theorem
Rule for updating probability of a hypothesis given new evidence.
Pareto principle
Roughly 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of causes.