4 ms·

Probably the highest point in my physics "career" was when my advisor recommended Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur [0] to me. It was after I had basi

Probably the highest point in my physics "career" was when my advisor recommended Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur [0] to me. It was after I had basically decided to abandon hope at academia and become an engineer, but I was just barely past the threshold of being able to understand the contents. I worked through the book solo and really greatly enjoyed it; highly visual and well paced. I'd recommend it to any undergrad+ who has made it past bra-kets and wants to see how far the rabbit hole goes. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18781406-quantum-field-theory-for-the-gifted-amateur https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18781406-quantum-field-t...

m_a_g 4y ago
My undergrad is in Computer Science and Engineering, but I would love to read and understand this book. Any recommendations for what to know beforehand? Some prerequisite books or subjects, maybe?
- andrew_eu 4y ago
  It's been a while now since I've picked it up, but I think the main content it assumes your comfortable with is on the order of a semester of Quantum Mechanics. Otherwise, it definitely uses quite a few tricks in calculus (e.g. integrating probability amplitudes, variational calculus, and likely some higher dimensional stuff). The later chapters probably get even more exotic, but the book prepares the reader pretty well I think. For book recommendations, the ones that come to the top of my mind are: - Griffiths' Quantum Mechanics [0]. It's become a pretty standard undergrad QM text, and in my experience was very approachable. - Div, Grad, Curl, and all that by Schehey [1]. I don't remember how much into vector calculus the QFT book got, but this one turned the tide of my undergrad personally. For ~120 pages it gave me a better intuition with 3D calculus than any other resource. - Something that covers calculus of variations, Euler-Legrange equation, etc. I first covered this in Classical Mechanics but don't remember the textbook. The Feynman Lectures of Physics [2] probably covers it, but I don't know for certain. Incidentally, Feynman is all over QFT, so his undergrad materials are probably excellent prep materials. I don't remember whether the book introduces bra-kets (Dirac notation) or assumes them, and I don't remember if Griffiths uses it at all. I first saw this notation in General Relativity, with Spacetime and Geometry [3], but I think there are definitely better materials that can explain the notation better. I'm pretty sure all of these books, and plenty more on these topics, should be widely (or freely) available. Good luck :) [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153908.Introduction_to_Quantum_Mechanics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153908.Introduction_to_Q... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703104.Div_Grad_Curl_and_All_That https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703104.Div_Grad_Curl_and... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5546.The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5546.The_Feynman_Lecture... [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/259680.Spacetime_and_Geometry https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/259680.Spacetime_and_Geo... Edit: newlines always get me
  - funklute 4y ago
    The Feynman lectures have a reputation for being very hit and miss. People who "get it" will find them really interesting and useful. But if you don't, then it might just confuse you. I know a condensed matter postdoc who told me he felt ready to tackle the Feynman lectures only after he had completed his phd....
    - zinclozenge 4y ago
      They're a great companion book, but you really need a book that guides you through derivations and computations. Some techniques are non-obvious like choosing coordinate systems to make integrals easier, clever contours when applying residue theorem, change of variables using orthogonal matrices to diagonalize symmetric matrices, etc.
  - jasomill 4y ago
    Something that covers calculus of variations, Euler-Legrange equation, etc. I first covered this in Classical Mechanics but don't remember the textbook. The Feynman Lectures of Physics [2] probably covers it, but I don't know for certain. Indeed it does: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html The original lecture recording is also available: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      Caltech is fantastic. They even have the old-form domain name there in your links, similar to Stanford CS department which is also exceptional in the nomenclature, but grandfathered in.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  If you have a talent for manipulating symbols before really understanding them, only a little bit of quantum mechanics. Realistically an undergraduate physics education
sigmoid10 4y ago
Another great book at that level is Student friendly Quantum Field Theory by Klauber. Especially if you struggle with the incomplete math treatments in standard books like Peskin & Schroeder, where the first chapter basically assumes you already know all the weird complex contour integrals that you usually only encounter in QFT. If Klauber says "from this easily follows ..." then you can expect to understand it even if you're not yet an expert. Ofc that comes with less depth in total, but there's no point in talking about renormalization if you haven't understood field quantization.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
I second the sentiment, that working through a book is the absolute best education. I worked through many. I copied down all the code in ANSI Common Lisp and answered all the questions in the book explicitly, wrote down my answers and everything. Except for the object-oriented part which the author says not to read. Says it was a requirement for the book in the 90s, he didn't want to include it. I didn't read it on his advice. That book also includes cryptic objections to political correctness, in a simulation you're supposed to run about a contest in an alien race that always ends in a tie or near-tie. The simulations the book proposes reveal equality of outcome in these contests is due to manipulation. You don't get even representation from fair contests. Whereas university admissions in general do end up with a lot of "underrepresented minorities"--and this Daniel Cussen saying that, my torturer said that I'm a "minority of one"--but the ties and near-ties are because of fixing. The game is rigged. But a book! That is an education! Then I attended Stanford and it was like, what is this shit? I gotta cheat to pass, the fuck? If you say I can't cheat and then you say I can cheat in a specific manner, eg asking a TA for all the answers, what do I do? My Chilean logic says, if they say you can't and say you can, you can't. Same rules as Magic: the Gathering, negative prevails over positive--and it's a matter of integrity, there's reasoning for this, both in Chile and in Magic, it makes perfect sense to me. Basically it's conservative. Not "negative" in the pejorative sense. Hell, weight loss is negative, is it bad to lose fat? Fatness is positive, bigger number on the scale. Why is negativity worse? Further I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, the negative hemisphere, there's a physical definition for its negativity. Is this wrong? Does negative magnetism translate to negative morality, which I truly do recognize as wrong? Manicheanism, yes, right is positive wrong is negative. I basically buy that. But with all physics? And of course technically positive current is incorrectly defined, it should be the other way around, electrons are what moves so they should be positive. Stanford I guess thinks can prevails over can't, should go over that in orientation. There shouldn't be contradictions like this in the first place, though. Admitted students have to be able to pass all courses without any cheating. I guess that's where I fucked up. Getting myself lobotomized, guess I'm no longer Stanford material despite having already been admitted. No longer have the brains. Literally no longer having the brains. That's literally it. But Stanford refused to protect me from lobotomy, I kept telling them how much harm I would go through, crying in my lynching meeting on February 6 2009, begging for a trial and always getting denied, going to every office I could, writing emails nobody gave any replies in writing to, telling my whole dorm I was getting lynched (apparently nobody does this). Stadmin only pushed me further into that system, jammed me further into the meat grinder. Meat grinder. Think of it like a blender, what happens to meat that goes in? Does it retain its shape? No it gets diced right? Just watched gloatingly as I got put through the system. Watched with relish. Young white man getting lynched. That is the consummation of the Civil Rights Movement, young white man getting lynched. It's not as platonic, abstract and noble as it pretends to be. White is negative. Young white man getting lynched? Justice. But back to my point: the book. It used to be, before universities monopolized annointing the intelligent as such, that it wasn't about going to the right schools. It was about being well-read. Universities didn't exist before AD 1000, University of Bologna. And even then it started slow. Books are better.
garbanz0 4y ago
Any book recommendations for someone who almost failed physics in college but wants to understand QM at a high level?
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492656224 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492656224 https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime

m_a_g 4y ago

My undergrad is in Computer Science and Engineering, but I would love to read and understand this book. Any recommendations for what to know beforehand? Some prerequisite books or subjects, maybe?

andrew_eu 4y ago
It's been a while now since I've picked it up, but I think the main content it assumes your comfortable with is on the order of a semester of Quantum Mechanics. Otherwise, it definitely uses quite a few tricks in calculus (e.g. integrating probability amplitudes, variational calculus, and likely some higher dimensional stuff). The later chapters probably get even more exotic, but the book prepares the reader pretty well I think. For book recommendations, the ones that come to the top of my mind are: - Griffiths' Quantum Mechanics [0]. It's become a pretty standard undergrad QM text, and in my experience was very approachable. - Div, Grad, Curl, and all that by Schehey [1]. I don't remember how much into vector calculus the QFT book got, but this one turned the tide of my undergrad personally. For ~120 pages it gave me a better intuition with 3D calculus than any other resource. - Something that covers calculus of variations, Euler-Legrange equation, etc. I first covered this in Classical Mechanics but don't remember the textbook. The Feynman Lectures of Physics [2] probably covers it, but I don't know for certain. Incidentally, Feynman is all over QFT, so his undergrad materials are probably excellent prep materials. I don't remember whether the book introduces bra-kets (Dirac notation) or assumes them, and I don't remember if Griffiths uses it at all. I first saw this notation in General Relativity, with Spacetime and Geometry [3], but I think there are definitely better materials that can explain the notation better. I'm pretty sure all of these books, and plenty more on these topics, should be widely (or freely) available. Good luck :) [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153908.Introduction_to_Quantum_Mechanics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153908.Introduction_to_Q... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703104.Div_Grad_Curl_and_All_That https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/703104.Div_Grad_Curl_and... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5546.The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physics https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5546.The_Feynman_Lecture... [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/259680.Spacetime_and_Geometry https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/259680.Spacetime_and_Geo... Edit: newlines always get me
- funklute 4y ago
  The Feynman lectures have a reputation for being very hit and miss. People who "get it" will find them really interesting and useful. But if you don't, then it might just confuse you. I know a condensed matter postdoc who told me he felt ready to tackle the Feynman lectures only after he had completed his phd....
  - zinclozenge 4y ago
    They're a great companion book, but you really need a book that guides you through derivations and computations. Some techniques are non-obvious like choosing coordinate systems to make integrals easier, clever contours when applying residue theorem, change of variables using orthogonal matrices to diagonalize symmetric matrices, etc.
- jasomill 4y ago
  Something that covers calculus of variations, Euler-Legrange equation, etc. I first covered this in Classical Mechanics but don't remember the textbook. The Feynman Lectures of Physics [2] probably covers it, but I don't know for certain. Indeed it does: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html The original lecture recording is also available: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Caltech is fantastic. They even have the old-form domain name there in your links, similar to Stanford CS department which is also exceptional in the nomenclature, but grandfathered in.
mhh__ 4y ago
If you have a talent for manipulating symbols before really understanding them, only a little bit of quantum mechanics. Realistically an undergraduate physics education

sigmoid10 4y ago

Another great book at that level is Student friendly Quantum Field Theory by Klauber. Especially if you struggle with the incomplete math treatments in standard books like Peskin & Schroeder, where the first chapter basically assumes you already know all the weird complex contour integrals that you usually only encounter in QFT. If Klauber says "from this easily follows ..." then you can expect to understand it even if you're not yet an expert. Ofc that comes with less depth in total, but there's no point in talking about renormalization if you haven't understood field quantization.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

I second the sentiment, that working through a book is the absolute best education. I worked through many. I copied down all the code in ANSI Common Lisp and answered all the questions in the book explicitly, wrote down my answers and everything. Except for the object-oriented part which the author says not to read. Says it was a requirement for the book in the 90s, he didn't want to include it. I didn't read it on his advice. That book also includes cryptic objections to political correctness, in a simulation you're supposed to run about a contest in an alien race that always ends in a tie or near-tie. The simulations the book proposes reveal equality of outcome in these contests is due to manipulation. You don't get even representation from fair contests. Whereas university admissions in general do end up with a lot of "underrepresented minorities"--and this Daniel Cussen saying that, my torturer said that I'm a "minority of one"--but the ties and near-ties are because of fixing. The game is rigged. But a book! That is an education! Then I attended Stanford and it was like, what is this shit? I gotta cheat to pass, the fuck? If you say I can't cheat and then you say I can cheat in a specific manner, eg asking a TA for all the answers, what do I do? My Chilean logic says, if they say you can't and say you can, you can't. Same rules as Magic: the Gathering, negative prevails over positive--and it's a matter of integrity, there's reasoning for this, both in Chile and in Magic, it makes perfect sense to me. Basically it's conservative. Not "negative" in the pejorative sense. Hell, weight loss is negative, is it bad to lose fat? Fatness is positive, bigger number on the scale. Why is negativity worse? Further I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, the negative hemisphere, there's a physical definition for its negativity. Is this wrong? Does negative magnetism translate to negative morality, which I truly do recognize as wrong? Manicheanism, yes, right is positive wrong is negative. I basically buy that. But with all physics? And of course technically positive current is incorrectly defined, it should be the other way around, electrons are what moves so they should be positive. Stanford I guess thinks can prevails over can't, should go over that in orientation. There shouldn't be contradictions like this in the first place, though. Admitted students have to be able to pass all courses without any cheating. I guess that's where I fucked up. Getting myself lobotomized, guess I'm no longer Stanford material despite having already been admitted. No longer have the brains. Literally no longer having the brains. That's literally it. But Stanford refused to protect me from lobotomy, I kept telling them how much harm I would go through, crying in my lynching meeting on February 6 2009, begging for a trial and always getting denied, going to every office I could, writing emails nobody gave any replies in writing to, telling my whole dorm I was getting lynched (apparently nobody does this). Stadmin only pushed me further into that system, jammed me further into the meat grinder. Meat grinder. Think of it like a blender, what happens to meat that goes in? Does it retain its shape? No it gets diced right? Just watched gloatingly as I got put through the system. Watched with relish. Young white man getting lynched. That is the consummation of the Civil Rights Movement, young white man getting lynched. It's not as platonic, abstract and noble as it pretends to be. White is negative. Young white man getting lynched? Justice. But back to my point: the book. It used to be, before universities monopolized annointing the intelligent as such, that it wasn't about going to the right schools. It was about being well-read. Universities didn't exist before AD 1000, University of Bologna. And even then it started slow. Books are better.

garbanz0 4y ago

Any book recommendations for someone who almost failed physics in college but wants to understand QM at a high level?

dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492656224 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1492656224 https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime