QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

What Hacker News says

1. plaguepilledJul 2022
   Quantum Field Theory by Peskin and Schroeder. There are many things in that book I could make into a standalone project that could occupy years at a time.

   Some other picks:

   The Man in The High Castle by Phil K. Dick. The Plague or The Outsider by Albert Camus. City of Thieves by David Benioff.

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2. orbifoldJun 2020
   Well these centralised resources are books. There are high quality (almost standard) books for most subjects. Want to learn Analysis at a Graduate level? Pick one of the popular books Rudin (for example) and work through it. Same goes for Quantum Field Theory (Peskin & Schroeder, Zee, Srednicki,...) and tons of other subjects.

   The lectures are often only a guided tour through one of those books (at least at the undergraduate and early graduate level). In many ways lectures are still la huge advantage of course because most of these books are too long to be useful (I still have some guilt when I think about how little I absorbed of the 500+ pages experimental condensed matter book we used). Often the exercises then cover things that were not explicitly explained in the lecture but can be worked out with the help of the book.

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3. matthewwMay 2011
   I'm not sure what sophomore-level was for you, but the next step or refresher would be Quantum Mechanics. Griffiths is the standard introductory text, though I'm partial to Liboff. You'll want to work through a higher level textbook of QM after that; Sakurai and Shankar are two popular ones.

   From there, you'd have a good basis to study some particle physics. The two introductory texts are either Halzen and Marten or Griffiths (same author, different book). Either of those will give you a pretty solid understanding of particle physics, including QED. You could supplement that by studying some Quantum Field Theory (QFT). At the moment, Peskin and Schroeder is the classic text.

   Depending on your interests, you could continue in QFT with P&S. That text probably covers at least 3 terms of graduate QFT. You could also study GR. Carroll is the most popular text at the moment, but I like Schutz and others swear by Wald. If you're interested in experimental stuff, you could learn about detectors using the text by Green.

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4. frobMar 2021
   This is absolutely the best explanation of virtual particles I have ever seen. I've worked through pages of Quantum Field Theory (I'm literally looking at my copy of Peskin and Schroeder sitting atop Krane right now), expanded and calculated hundreds of Feynman diagrams, written pages about these concepts, and yet I would say this article gives the best intuitive explanation of what is going on I've ever seen. I absolutely love that he mixes in the aside about the permittivity of free space arising from loops in the vacuum.

   I am adding this framework to my set of tools to explain (and intuit about) QFT. And going back for a reread now. Well done!

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