I just read that general relativity is the extension of special relativity which to me is weird because you'd think that by their names it'd be the other way around.
General things are better, they can be applied to more things. Its a little tautological but the Special Theory of Relativity is a special case of the more general General Theory of Relativity. When initially developed it wasn't called 'special relativity', only later when its context within a larger theory was realised did it get the 'special' tag. Happens a lot, the special cases are often easier to understand and only as time passes and understanding developed does the model get slotted into a larger theory. QED was developed first of the physically applicable quantum field theories but it wasn't really put into a consistent context till people realised its just part of the fuller electroweak theory, which people now try to combine with QCD and a few other things to make GUTs.
I vaguely remember something similar about Noethers Theorem, which was a general application to begin with, but later the special cases evolved. I need to find reference to this. I feel a bit shakey saying this, because its only a vague memory.
Definitely a reference is needed here. Once you have the general case figured out, special subcases of that general case tend to follow immediately with little effort. If you're trying to say conservation of momentum and energy was discovered after Noether's theorem, you'd be way out to lunch. If that's not what you're saying, please clarify with some details.
Oh no no, I didn't mean conservation at all. You are right, I need to find the source in which I read this. Oh here we go again, I spent four hours yesterday looking for a reference, which I did finally find... but... here we go again lol
I'll try wiki to begin with. That's always a good place to start. God knows what I've read off those pages and commited to memory. And in some cases, have shown out to be erreneous statements ~ On reflection, I have began to loose confidence in old' wiki.
Right, well, so far... but give me more time to find something definate, is this: Groups of canonical transformations and the virial-Noether theorem ... by B Nachtergaele - 1986 - Cited by 2 - Related articles The result is used to derive a general form of the virial theorem, which has Noether's theorem as a special case. The theory is applied to the Toda lattice ... linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0393044086900124
It's ok, found the source, wiki it was. ''Although useful in its own right, the version of her theorem just given was a special case of the general version she derived in 1915. ''
