An introduction to quantum field theory

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1. evanbJul 2017
   I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

   CULTURAL

   Einstein - Essays in Humanism

   Frayn - Copenhagen

   Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

   Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

   de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

   Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

   Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

   Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

   Macaulay - The Way Things Work

   Paulos - Innumeracy

   Sagan - Cosmos

   Sagan - Broca's Brain

   Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

   Salam - Science in the Third World

   Seife - Zero

   Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

   POPULAR

   Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)

   Feynman - The Meaning of It All

   Feynman - Lectures on Physics

   Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

   Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

   Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

   Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

   Hawking - A Brief History of Time

   Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

   Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

   Polya - How to Solve It

   Schrödinger - What is Life?

   Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

   Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

   Wallace - Everything And More

   Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

   Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

   TEXTS

   Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )

   Abelson and Sussman - SICP

   Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics

   Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

   Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

   Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

   Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

   Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

   Fermi - Thermodynamics

   Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

   Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

   Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

   Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

   Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)

   Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

   Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

   Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

   Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

   Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

   Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

   Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

   Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)

   Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

   Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

   Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

   Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

   Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

   Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

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2. mhartlFeb 2010
   If you're interested in how these really work, a good place to start is Introduction to Elementary Particles by David Griffiths. For the full-strength stuff, go with An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory by Peskin and Schroeder.
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3. michelesAug 2024
   I remember when I took my course of "Theoretical Physics" (so called, it was an Introduction to Quantum Field Theory in actuality) and I realized that particles do not exist. It was quite an enlightenment. Particles are a convenient description of Quantum Fields in the perturbative regime, but what Quantum Fields are is not known, not even at the mathematical level. When you live at frontier of knowledge, as a Theoretical Physicists, reality becomes fuzzy. But that's life.
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4. fhcxvbdbFeb 2023
   he aim of putting my notes for “An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory by Peskin & Schroeder, Published 2018 by CRC Press” to this webpage is to fill the gap on the derivations that the authors of this book skipped.
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5. AlexCoventryDec 2016
   Thanks again. Your suggestions led me to scan the QC174.45 shelves at a nearby university library. I settled on Maggiore's A Modern Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, which seems to be almost all Math.
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6. yetanotheraccDec 2015
   Absolutely amazing, changed the way I look at the society, will re-read:

   - George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

   Loved:

   - Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns

   - Andy Weir, The Martian

   - Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

   - Greg Egan, Teranesia

   Liked:

   - Arthur C. Clarke, 3001: The Final Odyssey

   - Arthur C. Clarke, 2061: Odyssey Three

   - Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Laws

   - Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

   - Jonathan Slack, Stem Cells: A Very Short Introduction

   - John Scalzi, Fuzzy Nation (bought the audiobook for Wil Wheaton's narration)

   - Ray Monk, Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

   - Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

   - David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb

   Found full of BS, did not finish:

   - Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

   Textbooks:

   - order of 10^3 pages of Open University textbooks

   - Klauber, Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory

   - Feynman & Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

   - Wald, General Relativity (5 chapters)

   - Peskin & Schroeder, An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (5 chapters)

   Not as bad as I felt before making the list, but underwhelming in terms of quantity. I intend to read a whole lot more in 2016.

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