

The principle of least action: a more elegant mechanics - nilaykumar
http://wherenothinggathers.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-principle-of-least-action.html

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gwillen
If I remember nothing else from Physical Mechanics 1 -- and I probably won't
-- I will always remember that the calculus of variations and the principle of
least action are fucking dark magic.

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Kroem3r
My recollection is of a deep irritation, like, "You people have me dorking
around with all these hopeless special cases, when all along we could have
been doing this? For fuck's sake, why?"

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Evbn
The action integral isn't solvable. You need to go to the special cases to get
anything done. It is like saying energy is always constant. Sounds profound,
but actually computationally useless on its own, since the invariant is broken
frequently, until we go find something else to also call energy (gravitational
potential, kinetic, electric potential, heat, mass! , etc)

