High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In physics, particularly in quantum field theory, configurations of a physical system that satisfy classical equations of motion are called on shell, and those that do not are called off shell. Functional equations which hold off-shell are denoted by the "=" sign. Functional equations which only hold on-shell are denoted by "approx". For instance, in classical mechanics in the action formulation, extremal solutions to the variational principle are on shell and the Euler-Lagrange equations are on shell equations (i.e., they do not hold off shell). Noether's theorem is also another on shell theorem.