Talk:Continuous symmetry

Should we merge this with Continuous group action?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_group_action seems like relevant — Preceding unsigned comment added by Agnishom (talk • contribs) 01:45, 7 February 2020 (UTC)

stub status
Made this article a stub since the definition is not especially clear. The only definition in the article is "idea viewing some symmetries as motions." Needs elaboration. An example would be helpful as well. The remainder of the article is not accessible to someone new to the topic. For instance, the example of a motion references a Lie group, which in turn references continuous symmetry. So if you don't understand one, you're out of luck. Ealdent (talk) 08:13, 17 November 2007 (UTC)


 * It never wasn't rated as a stub (see the template above). Templates belong on the talk pages of articles, but thank you for trying to help out. As far as accessibility goes, this is a problem for quite a few higher math articles and as of yet there is no solution for this problem. Basically articles must assume a certain level of knowledge in order to remain on topic. However, this article, being a stub, has a lot of room for improvement (Be bold if you can help out). Cheers—Cronholm144 09:23, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Please add more mathematical references
I agree that the given definition of "continuous symmetry" is somewhat vague, however I like that the attempt is mathematical. However more mathematical references are needed.

In particular I would like to see more mathematical references where to find more explicit details about the concept of "continuous symmetry". I studied the basics about groups of transformations and what is generally called Lie theory, including representation theory, and was hoping to find a treatment of continuous symmetry purely, or at least mostly, mathematical. I have noticed that there are many physics articles about continuos symmetry and probably even more about broken continuous symmetries. However such articles seem impenetrable to somebody like me who has not studied quantum mechanics. I guess what I am looking for is a book or article like G. Folland's fantastic treatment of the Heisenberg group in Harmonic Analysis in Phase Space, (Princeton University Press, 1989),which is purely mathematical.

By the way, I almost bought a copy of the book by Howe & Barker (2007), Continuous Symmetry, included as the only reference for this wikipedia article. It is an interesting, unique book, however after briefly browsing its pages I received the impression that is a synthetic treatment of Euclidean geometry using groups of transformations. In fact I was not able to find anywhere the words "continuous" or "differentiable". Maybe they are somewhere there, but they are not easy to find and they are not included in the index. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.173.6.105 (talk) 23:48, 26 September 2015 (UTC)

Too vague
The article says some things about continuous symmetry, but doesn't concretely define it. It ought to be more explicit. 133.48.64.176 (talk) 03:29, 25 January 2017 (UTC)