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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.


> It has to do with invariance under an arbitrary selection of parameters like scale, hence, choice of railroad gauge.

Could you elaborate on that?


Just as you can select whatever railroad gauge as a country (if you also build compatible trains, obviously) and have it work just fine no matter what you select--until you try to connect it to another country and then you need to have converters--, some physical theories have gauges like this that you can choose however you want and it will work fine (and be equivalent to a theory in any other gauge)--but if you want the theory to work with the next guy's theory you have to have converters.




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