@Danu: Ahhh. I just remembered that there is "Quantisation of gauge systems" by Henneaux and Teitelboim. I'm told it's very good, which is why I am going to read it, but I haven't, so I cannot say anything more about it.
@DanielSank do you have any good application for original Szechuan peppers? Their taste is so strange, it kind of offended my taste buds when I put them in a 'regular' dish today
@Danu I feel like a sentence got deleted in last-minute editing on page 263 of the first volume. There's an incomplete sentence and then the next sentence randomly picks up as a new paragraph.
@Danu For like a page.
Zee assumes you have a crazy good QM/CM background. The phenomenology is incredible.
@Danu Yeah, I have a problem with Zee's informal style. Informally writing everything makes it really hard to look stuff up. And that reduces its value in my opinion to beginners.
@0celo7 Ufff. Well, the Jones polynomial is the topological invariant of a knot that is also essentially the expectation value of the Wilson loop operator associated to the knot if you consider it as a loop in 3D Chern-Simons :D
I don't know how to explain it, I'm no knot theorist.
@0celo7 I like both books! It's not that I dislike them. He's a really good writer. I just felt like this point it fell short on. But he's a colorful explainer
@0celo7 Have you read the QFT book? If you already know QFT differently, you have to trace back every time to check what this or that index is supposed to represent.
@0celo7 I love QFT. In part because I liked stuff that's testable. Also, string theory seems like the energy scales are too small to be of interest for more applied stuff in chemistry. GR is awesome but I feel like QG seems like an area that's intertwined with ST so I'm reluctant to go into that. I just don't know how ST is going to turn out. But I'm still learning!
@0celo7 I have the PDF. I haven't read it. I've been using QFT for the Gifted Amateur. I was slow at learning it but since coming here, I've learned a ton in the last few months just by being able to ask questions about stuff I'm confused on. I'm starting to look for more advanced texts.
@Danu That's good to know. I was surprised my QFT for the Gifted Amateur didn't cover it, but that seems to be targeted at a more general audience even though it's probably too demanding for casual readers.
@0celo7 lol well, when I skim through, I usually don't know what any of them mean so that rule probably doesn't apply to me.
@0celo7 Story on group theory. I actually became a composer because I wanted to teach myself group theory but couldn't understand it. So I studied group theory applied to music theory and then was able to start learning about how it's used in physics.
Guerrino Mazzola has written Topos of Music. I can't really read it. It's so mathematical. But he has a lot of cool ideas involving modules and rings. I'm sure people here would find it intelligible.
@StanShunpike I don't believe he worked on this. He did come up with the concept of a topos, though ;) Arguably the most influential mathematician of the 20th century
@ACuriousMind This is in a topological context. We have the Lagrangian $\mathcal{L}=\mathcal{L}_0+\gamma\epsilon^{\mu\nu\lambda}a_\mu \partial_\nu a_\lambda+a_\mu j^\mu$. Zee says moving one particle past the other gives a phase factor $e^{i\theta}$. What's the expression for that $\theta$?
Just one of the many paragraphs: "In sum, we don't need the author's geometry of music at all. While there are many analytical insights offered in the book, none of them really benefit from a projection into a complicated geometrical space, and the few that seem to could often be improved by much simpler and straightforward geometries that the author seems to overlook or discount. ...
...There are some theoretical insights about the most consonant chords which supposedly relate to this system, but the properties within the system are again not sufficient to uniquely define the consonant chords or to throw out less consonant ones -- despite the author's bizarre parable about God handing off a "suitcase of chords" with the author's properties ...
...(a story whose implicit deification would highlight the author's arrogance if it didn't sound more like a drug deal in a bathroom than a rationale for why we should accept the truth of a multidimensional chordal space)."
@ChrisWhite and everyone else on this whole topic: youtube.com/… I've wanted to "transcribe" music into more of a structural programmatic format for a bit! (at least watch the music starting at 34:50)
@NeuroFuzzy I imagine if you learned it for this, you'd also use it for everything else, eh? ;)
@0celo7 It's one of the most formalized forms of "beauty", and hence a good shot at understanding what it really is. And what could be more beautiful than understanding beauty? ;)
@dmckee isn't an exaggeration to ask us whether an article is good or bad? I see sometimes questions about articles, and it seems to me absurd to expect from us to read a couple of tens of pages and give an opinion. Shouldn't such questions be marked as "off-topic"?
@Sofia Ping is the notification (this can be a sound if you have this option enabled) that one gets when ones name is mentioned with an "@" in a chat room, just as what's happening to you now that I send you this message
@Danu as I said, I thought that it doesn't work. From that room, when I typed the symbol "@", your name didn't appear, so I thought that I have to stay in the h bar room and type to you from there. And I wasn't convinced that it's correct, so I jumped to some question.
Am I going crazy or is this post obviously not an answer. I'm only concerned because a fairly high-rep user posted it and disagrees that it is not an answer. Seemed obvious to me, but now I'm thinking maybe I've lost touch with how this site is supposed to work
@0celo7 For instance, I recognized early on when composing that at any time during a song you can only have three types of notes available or there is dissonance, it sounds bad.
@0celo7 and whenever I compose I always make sure I never violate that rule. It helps me think through what notes to choose and let's me identify pleasant sequences faster.
@ACuriousMind well, no, but I honestly do think that going by guidelines over one person's opinion but listening to the collective when told your interpretation is wrong is a fair and reasonable approach
@0celo7 ooo another book. I will look at it. Yeah, Wald is nice. I really like him. I wish I had met him first before MTW. That behemoth is so confusing to read.
Yeah, well, even the best of books have typos. What's unfortunate is that mathematical typos seem to have a disproportionately misleading effect compared to just a typo in a word.
@0celo7 I just started to read it. I think I'm through chapter 1. I tried a year ago and couldn't do it. But I've learned a lot since then and it's much easier. I've been doing the exercises without a problem.
@JimdalftheGrey Well, it seemed to be a better fit from the question asked than the one that it's a duplicate of, and if you go through the linked questions, you'll see that there is actually something like a three-duplicate chain in there somewhere, so it seems we can and do close questions as duplicates of duplicates
user54412
@0celo7 Maybe....? But there's this sort of taboo against citing textbooks in general, except for a few particularly referency ones.
@ACuriousMind Okay, you can but you shouldn't. If question A is a duplicate of B and B is a duplicate of C, then A should be closed as a duplicate of C, not B. But if A is not a duplicate of C, then clearly either B is not really a duplicate of C or A is not really a duplicate of B. The main point is thought that it doesn't make sense to close as a dupe of a dupe. That defeats the purpose
Perhaps if an egg is frozen it might damage a windshield, but I am not enthusiastic about conducting experimental tests:-)
