Recently learned of this from the german-spoken podcast AstroGeo. If someone wants to listen to this Large Numbers Hypothesis story in podcast form, I enjoyed that episode: https://astrogeo.de/expandierende-erde-zu-grosse-zahlen-und-... (no affiliation)
This has the perfect qoutation for the well known fact of the Galileo->Lorentz group overthrow from an indisputable source:
"The theory of relativity introduced mathematical beauty to an unprecedented extent into the description of Nature. The restricted theory { 1905 } changed our ideas of space and time in a way that may be summarised by stating that the group of transformations to which the space-time continuum is subject must be changed from the Galilean group to the Lorentz group. The latter group is a much more beautiful thing than the former - in fact, the former would be called mathematically a degenerate special case of the latter { c->∞ }. The general theory of relativity { 1915 } involved another step of a rather similar character" { diffeomorphism group/category }. I came to think lately that much of the basic groups in physics, Lorentz and gauge, have all more or less rotatory features.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] thread* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
If you prefer to read, this 1939 paper by Dirac is a characteristically lucid discussion of similar themes:
The Relation between Mathematics and Physics [PDF]
http://mcs.une.edu.au/~pmth213/PapersOfInterest/Paul%20Dirac...
"The theory of relativity introduced mathematical beauty to an unprecedented extent into the description of Nature. The restricted theory { 1905 } changed our ideas of space and time in a way that may be summarised by stating that the group of transformations to which the space-time continuum is subject must be changed from the Galilean group to the Lorentz group. The latter group is a much more beautiful thing than the former - in fact, the former would be called mathematically a degenerate special case of the latter { c->∞ }. The general theory of relativity { 1915 } involved another step of a rather similar character" { diffeomorphism group/category }. I came to think lately that much of the basic groups in physics, Lorentz and gauge, have all more or less rotatory features.