@0celo7 You got me really confused there for a sec. BLT = Bacon, Lettuce & Tomato to me ;)
Stuff is happening again with that one girl
4
Anyways, for the Henneaux and Teitelboim
So Mukhanov, in his QFT in curved spacetimes course, decided we need to redo everything from Hamiltonian mechanics, QM, canonical quantization etc. over in fast-forward before we can really start on the material lol
So he ended up talking about Lagrangians, Hamiltonians and the like
At some point, he brings up the issue on which is more fundamental, and says he prefers to think of the Hamiltonian as more fundamental, referring in passage to Henneaux & Teitelboim's book
(I read a few pages and saw that, indeed, they argue this point on the first page or so)
So, he said yeah, this book was written by my close friend Teitelboim and it's excellent, very nice
So, Mukhanov praises the book, but then stops and thinks for a second, and says:
"Though it is a very very nice book, I don't really understand. Why do they develop all of this theory? If you look at the book, it's 500 pages fancy mathematics. Then, in the last chapter they finally apply it to physics. Guess what they apply it to?"
Student: "The harmonic oscillator?" Mukhanov: "No, no, Maxwell theory!"
"...so I go to Teitelboim (who is now not called Teitelboim anymore) and asked him: Why do you develop nuclear bomb in order to kill mosquitoes?!"
Teitelboim: "We wanted to (and were going to) make a second volume, but then we talked with Witten and he convinced us that it was all useless anyways because strings were the only right thing to do. So we never wrote the second volume with applications."