Recent content by haushofer

Yeah, I recognize that. When I followed a course on QFT, I just wanted to be able to calculate some amplitudes and understand renormalization. Only after that course the questions kicked in: why are spacetime suddenly mere labels? Don't we have a position operator anymore? What's the ontology of...

My name is Bond. Molecular Bond.

I'm not sure whether this topic is a question, a general remark or a video promotion. Let me take my crystal ball to see.

I once wrote some personal notes on QFT about stuff I was bothered with; the basics of i-epsilon prescriptions, contour integration, Planck units and renormalization; things like that. Somehow you'd say somebody wrote a textbook with this kind of techniques used in QFT. But apparently it's...

For people who like the ancient near East: check out the Digital Hammurabi channel of Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis (Lewis' podcast with Bart Ehrman is also excellent by the way). They also give courses on languages like Akkadian. One of those channels which make me doubt my career choice as a...

In contemporary Dutch it's still "fukken", derived from the English. "Je moet niet met me fukken"/ "don't f*ck with me" 😋

Consuming way too much alcohol, listening to Queen and Led Zeppelin, being frustrated by not understanding Hawking's Brief history of time, reading Brian Greene on string theory and spending most of my time playing the piano. Leaving no room for school, now I think about it.

Sad, but 94 is a great age and unlike many of his collegues cooking up SUSY he lived to see his predicted particle actually being measured.

Just to add: in my experience good students are not good researchers per se. Getting good marks on exams is a different skill than doing independent research. And the question is whether you're using the politics merely as an excuse.

If you prove that the first derivative of f(x)=x^2 vanishes in x=0, does this mean it vanishes in every point? You can change your grid such that the point formarly known as x=0 is moved to x=b such that now f'(x=b) becomes 0, but this is only in this particular point again.

I'd say they're roughly at the same level. What you miss out on depends on what you want to do with it. (I'm more familiar with P&S and Schwartz.) But looking at the content I'd say they're all good; just see which style suits you best.

I wouldn't describe it like that. Renormalization allows you to connect theoretical parameters on paper to measurable stuff in a lab. It's much more than "just removing infinities" like some sort of trick.

Isn't this inverse defined by identifying the vector space with its double dual?

Zee's book on Group Theory has a nice overview on Clifford algebras.

Step 3 is just saying the Lagrangian is a scalar (density) under translations, right? I also find this stuff treacherous, and many textbooks completely miss these subtleties and make it look easy. My confusion for a long time was that these symmetries are derived "on shell", but then EL=0 for...