Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell
"A quantum field theory text for the twenty-first century, this book makes the essential tool of modern theoretical physics available to any student who has completed a course on quantum mechanics and is eager to go on." "Without a solid understanding of quantum field theory, no student can claim to have mastered contemporary theoretical physics. Offering a remarkably accessible conceptual introduction, this text will be widely welcomed and used."--Jacket.
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- Read "Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell."
- There is a nice derivation of Newton’s law from quantum field theory in Zee‘s book „Quantum Field theory in a nutshell“. You can also arrive at Einstein’s field equations by deriving the beta function of bosonic string theory and (2-2 scattering to be precise) and requiring that it is constant.
- Feynman, Leighton, and Sands - The Feynman Lectures: I always look here for a good intuitive explanation.
A. Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell: this is so approachable and in the path integral formulation of QFT. Anyone who points you towards Peskin and Schroeder wants you to suffer.
Gattringer and Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice: essential reading for anyone learning lattice QCD.
- I help out on Physics Stack Exchange and the Freenode ##physics channel can still be nicely active sometimes, though not as active as ##math is.
If you want that sort of story, one textbook that you might incredibly like would be Griffiths' Introduction to Elementary Particles, which has a very readable first section going into the history of how we came to have the Standard Model that we have today, some names of who discovered what, etc.
A. Zee's Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell is also very nice for getting a sort of pleasant appreciation for quantum field theory if you've got some mathematical background.
It also depends on what you take for granted as a baseline. If you can find Feynman's New Zealand lectures, for example, you will notice that he deliberately avoids introducing explicit complex numbers or explicit integration, and still manages to convey what both of those mathematical formalisms allow the theory to do. (There are also some little gems. Like, if you pay attention to the part where he says something like "I wish I had brought an example of one of these surfaces where we've erased lines of the mirror so that I could show you" -- then you're in the right position to say, "holy crap, I understand the rainbows that I see in the bottom of CDs/DVDs now!" after a second.)
Sussman of Lisp fame went on to write The Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/... .
I'd be remiss if I did not mention that the father of String Theory is on a quest to provide everyone with the education needed to appreciate the current theories of physics; see http://theoreticalminimum.com/ or just look up Susskind on YouTube; e.g. "Susskind Statistical Mechanics" turns up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1RzvXDXyqA .
If you really want cutting-edge sometimes-somewhat-unbelievable stuff, the Perimeter Institute publishes their lectures-for-the-public online; you might for example really like Penrose's idea that maybe someday when all the black holes have evaporated, all of the particles become massless and they no longer experience time so we can just evolve the system to t=infinity after some finite time: so we discover that what we get as our boundary at infinity could be conformally rescaled to something resembling a t=0 Big Bang -- a "conformal cyclic cosmology". See http://pirsa.org/index.php?p=speaker&name=Roger_Penrose for more of that sort of stuff.
- 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
- Another example of the main point in this post is a simpler integral 0 to 2*pi of (sin x)^2 or (cos x)^2. By noting that both integrals will be the same and looking at the integral of their sum.
The Gaussian integral in the post is on of the most useful out there.
I highly recommend the Wikipedia page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_integral
Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell by Zee bases a couple of chapters on this integral.
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