Comment by scotty79
The word gauge is completely opaque to me, invokes no reasonable connotation.
I always wished they gave this thing a better name but I have no idea what.
The word gauge is completely opaque to me, invokes no reasonable connotation.
I always wished they gave this thing a better name but I have no idea what.
It's named that for a reason. It has to do with invariance under an arbitrary selection of parameters like scale, hence, choice of railroad gauge.
At least they tried to give a descriptive name! Most ideas are named after the people who are most closely associated with them. Yang-Mills. Newtonian. Euclidean. Planck. Many of those names invoke very specific ideas, even though eponyms are about as opaque as they come.