Bram Boroson, Master of Subtle Ways and Straight (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} bram) wrote,@ 2007-11-24 22:45:00 |
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Quantum Field Theory
Sidney Coleman, a leading theoretical physicist and educator, died last week.
When I was a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, I sat in on about half of his famous course on Quantum Field Theory. Coleman was famous as a dynamic teacher of this class, and he was one of the funniest physicists around. Although I feel I have a solid understanding of quantum mechanics itself from my undergraduate education, and I studied quantum spectroscopy with a nice old man named Garstang in Colorado, I'm mostly self-taught in Quantum Field Theory and beyond--and would like to teach myself more!
Coleman was also well-known for his lectures on symmetry, for his "no go" theorem that certain symmetries couldn't be combined, and for investigating why the cosmological constant is so much less than one might suppose from quantum theory.
Here's a picture of Sidney Coleman (from his Wikipedia entry):
I've downloaded a number of Quantum Field Theory textbooks from the web over the past few years, including one by Freeman Dyson himself (Dyson showed that Feynman's formulation in terms of Feynman diagrams was equivalent to Schwinger's and Tomonaga's).
A couple of recent QFT finds: quantumfieldtheory.info is a site still in progress. It's designed to fill in some of the conceptual questions someone like me encounters moving from quantum mechanics to quantum field theory. For example, I liked the page clearing up the differing meanings of probability in QM and QFT.
I also came across weylmann.com, a site and blog centered around the 20th century mathematician Herman Weyl who invented gauge theory. Weyl's original version of the theory was a kind of super-relativity theory that suggested that the sizes of objects could change from place to place, but that you wouldn't notice because everything would change together. Einstein shot down the idea pretty quickly, but Weyl came back with another version that turned out to be right: the "quantum phase" could rotate from place to place--this principle, surprisingly, turns out to be responsible for the electromagnetic force!
I couldn't tell just who the writer of the weylmann blog is--he's apparently not a practicing theoretical physicist but someone who's interested in the subject. It's an interesting blog--he's apparently a left-wing Christian who also has little patience for the creationist types...
Sidney Coleman, a leading theoretical physicist and educator, died last week.
When I was a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, I sat in on about half of his famous course on Quantum Field Theory. Coleman was famous as a dynamic teacher of this class, and he was one of the funniest physicists around. Although I feel I have a solid understanding of quantum mechanics itself from my undergraduate education, and I studied quantum spectroscopy with a nice old man named Garstang in Colorado, I'm mostly self-taught in Quantum Field Theory and beyond--and would like to teach myself more!
Coleman was also well-known for his lectures on symmetry, for his "no go" theorem that certain symmetries couldn't be combined, and for investigating why the cosmological constant is so much less than one might suppose from quantum theory.
Here's a picture of Sidney Coleman (from his Wikipedia entry):
I've downloaded a number of Quantum Field Theory textbooks from the web over the past few years, including one by Freeman Dyson himself (Dyson showed that Feynman's formulation in terms of Feynman diagrams was equivalent to Schwinger's and Tomonaga's).
A couple of recent QFT finds: quantumfieldtheory.info is a site still in progress. It's designed to fill in some of the conceptual questions someone like me encounters moving from quantum mechanics to quantum field theory. For example, I liked the page clearing up the differing meanings of probability in QM and QFT.
I also came across weylmann.com, a site and blog centered around the 20th century mathematician Herman Weyl who invented gauge theory. Weyl's original version of the theory was a kind of super-relativity theory that suggested that the sizes of objects could change from place to place, but that you wouldn't notice because everything would change together. Einstein shot down the idea pretty quickly, but Weyl came back with another version that turned out to be right: the "quantum phase" could rotate from place to place--this principle, surprisingly, turns out to be responsible for the electromagnetic force!
I couldn't tell just who the writer of the weylmann blog is--he's apparently not a practicing theoretical physicist but someone who's interested in the subject. It's an interesting blog--he's apparently a left-wing Christian who also has little patience for the creationist types...
