Recent content by affinefield

  1. A

    Graduate Gravitons and gravity vs curvature of space-time.

    Thank you.Your comments prompted me to go back and read two papers by Weinberg from the Physical Review:"Photons and Gravitons in S-Matrix Theory",from 1964(V 135 #4b),and "Photons and Gravitons in Perturbation Theory",from 1965(V 138 #4b).I have always sided with Weinberg's observation that...
  2. A

    Graduate Gravitons and gravity vs curvature of space-time.

    Also,try to read articles(or chapters in texts,say) with titles like "Gravity as a Gauge Theory".Contrast Weinberg's "Gravitation and Cosmology" with MTW,and notice the difference.Think about scale,like "Norman" mentioned.Think about a type of "Bohr-Rosenfeld"analysis of the gravitational...
  3. A

    Graduate Gravitons and gravity vs curvature of space-time.

    You can basically divide the practicioners of General Relativity into two main camps:First,we have the "geometrodynamic camp" whose standard-bearer would be(after Einstein himself) John Wheeler and many of his students,though not all.Then,we have the "particle-physics camp",whose attitude toward...
  4. A

    Graduate Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

    Yeah,...,when Morse/Feshbach,way back in 1953,on the first page of chapter 1 of their "Methods of Theoretical Physics" said ",...,practically all of modern physics deals with fields,...,",they were not kidding.The bewildering variety of hadrons was only just beginning to become apparent.That was...
  5. A

    Graduate Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

    Fritz Rohlich's "Classical Charged Particles" from 1965,Addison-Wesley,is always a good read.Hubert Goenner's "On The History of Unified Field Theories"at the Living Reviews in Relativity website will aprise the reader of some of the major schemes to get at "matter"(gravitational mass) and...
  6. A

    Graduate Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

    I would like to correct a date:Bryce DeWitt's 3 famous quantum gravity papers were from 1967 not 1968,pardon me.
  7. A

    What should be my first QFT book? I'm an experimentalist ^_^

    Go to the FNAL and CERN webcast sites,and stay there.The streaming videos from FNAL are wonderful.The series of lectures by R.Kleiss from the CERN Webcast service,although not the highest quality,are very good on focusing on the field theory that particle physicists need.Good stuff,...
  8. A

    Graduate Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

    I got the name Rosenfeld wrong yesterday.Bohr and Rosenfeld gave a profound analysis of the simultaneous measurability of the electric and magnetic field strengths,and basically concluded that,no matter how well you measure each of them,their values do not commute.This gave the "Copenhagen...
  9. A

    Graduate Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

    I usually think in the following simple terms(analogy):Space and Time separate due to our scale,low-energy level,leads to the notion that "matter" and its "energy" are separate.Spacetime-special relativity-removes the distinction,so there is no longer a separate "conservation-law" for matter and...
  10. A

    Graduate Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

    Particles or Fields?.The origin,ultimately,of what you have in mind by the phrase "particle" is not just that which interacts via EM,Strong,Weak forces,but is also the seat or source of Gravitational/Inertial mass,the lower-case (m).This is not accounted for yet.It is still a brute fact,it is...
  11. A

    Graduate Particles vs Fields: What's More Fundamental?

    Yes to both questions.Schrödinger was the first to notice that quantum mechanical objects(everything)find their easiest and most natural representation in even NRQM as plain-wave solutions to a 2nd order PDE(a wave-equation),not as complicated little "spheres" held together in some fantastic...
  12. A

    Graduate Electric fields of electron and positron that undergo pair annihilation.

    Pair Production Pair production is ALWAYS "RELATIVISTIC"!.Think of Feynman.Think of the interpretation of processes in space-time,and reverse the direction.The production of a e(+)/e(-) pair from a photon of energy >2mc squared is EXACTLY THE SAME as the time-reversed process.Everything is...
  13. A

    Graduate What Is the Physical Meaning of the Torsion Tensor in General Relativity?

    Please read Richard Hammond's article "Torsion Gravity",Reports on Progress in Physics,from,I think,2002.It is an excelent article dealing with the evolution of what possible meaning the quantity "torsion" could have in physical theory,from Einstein-Cartan to the String Theory rumpus.Ideas of...
  14. A

    Graduate If the universe came from nothing

    Also,Pascaul Jordan,in the 1940's,came up with the notion that the entire mass/energy content of the Universe may be due SOLEY to its own negative gravitational potential energy.Something on the road to the nothing-idea.
  15. A

    Graduate If the universe came from nothing

    If "nothings" can be MEASURED and compared with other "nothings",then we have structure of some sort.As Eddington says in his his masterpiece "The Mathematical Theory of Relativity",1923 and 1930,2nd Ed."If nothing in the world is comparable to anything else,there cannot even be the rudiments of...