Recent content by physicsworks

This coming winter I am teaching a calculus-based intro physics class for non-physics science majors. The class historically uses the classic University Physics text by Young and Freedman, which I am OK with. Usually, for my classes I write my own sets of homework problems, however, in winter I...

Again, this is off-topic, but: thank you, I actually have read Dirac, both the original and the first Russian edition edited by Fock. Nowhere in the book did he elevate the notion of throwing out a part of the probability distribution describing a physical system to a grand status of a physical...

It does not. And not because Dirac uses the word "principle" instead of "postulate", or the word "jump" instead of "collapse". But this is indeed off-topic.

Yes, someone should finally start working on a remastered version of these video lectures, instead of producing yet another blu-ray extended super-duper edition of "you_name_it" from the "year_X".

Although different authors define it differently, I think what you are saying (i.e. Wald's definition and its consequences) is consisent with a definition given by Geroch in his article Domain of Dependence (let me know if you don't have access to it).

In the words of Lev Okun See his pedagogical articles in Physics Today, The Concept of Mass, and on the arxiv The Concept of Mass in the Einstein Year.

A long forgotten Matveev's classic text mentioned here (with a link to archive.org) is worth checking out. It is similar to Purcell in adopting "relativity-first" approach. Unfortunately, it's written in SI units (like most of modern textbooks on the subject). Update: another classic text by...

If QM and basic relativity are no problem, I would recommend Maggiore's A Modern Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. It provides a thorough introduction, has many worked out examples and (!) solutions to problems after each chapter in the back.

Even though ##L^{-1}(\Lambda p)## is not pretty, you can avoid dealing with it altogether by isolating this matrix on one side of your little-group defining equation ##W(\Lambda, p) = L^{-1}(\Lambda p)\Lambda L(p)##. Remember that ##W(\Lambda, p)## is a pure rotation and, as was mentioned above...

Well, just from the fact that boosted momentum as seen by ##\mathcal{O'}## lies in the ##OYZ##-plane, one can deduce that the corresponding Wigner rotation is around the ##x##-axis. This may help extracting the angle of rotation from the resulting ##W## matrix, although the whole process is...

I'm sorry, reported by who, I wonder? Those russians soldiers who were storming the largest NPP in Europe in the beginning of March (when it actually became an "object of military contention") or those who regularly send cruise missiles flying over close by? Or, perhaps, those who have set up a...

I would also add Duncan's "The Conceptual Framework of Quantum Field Theory" to this list.

I wasn't following this discussion closely and probably won't do it in the future because it's too difficult for me to handle at the personal level. I don't have energy to add much to the discussion, but I can't be silent. For the last six days I have been trying to help my immediate family...

Sent via private messages.

Sorry, I was accessing it from work when I last checked. The book can be downloaded on eduroam network as well.