@0celo7 in my solution of the exercise, I'm using the summation convention in the first line, but I didn't know how to write the 2nd and 3rd line with it, so I had to "quit" verlassen it
@ACuriousMind this whole coordinate-free stuff is more like, sometimes you find an object that can be expressed without coordinates, but to convert one coordinate-free expression to another you still need coordinates, isn't it?
@Bass Well, yes, at least some coordinate-free relations you have to prove in coordinates - after all, what defines your manifold is that it has coordinates, so it is not to be expected that you can prove everything without coordinates.
@Slereah and the basis is mostly $\frac\partial{\partial_\mu}$, which comes from the coordinates.. I thought coordinate-free means something like $R(X,Y)Z=\nabla_X\nabla_YZ-\nabla_Y\nabla_XZ-\nabla{[X,Y]}Z$
@Bass We-ell...if I take three forms and I want to sum then, I might label them $\omega_1,\omega_2,\omega_3$ and then write $\sum_i \omega_i$. It's coordinate-free, but there's an index
I don't . . . funtional analysis is about sobolev spaces. . . etc and other things, and I tried reading a real math book about it an almost jumped off a window lol
So quick question. Do you guys know about the book "fields" by Warren Siegel? One of my goals has been to read the whole thing and understand it. Do you think it is a good text to read? I have learned quite a bit of group theory from it so far.
@Slereah yeah, I am looking forward to getting to some of those topics. Supersymmetry is the first topic I am looking forward to really grasping once I reach it. I have learned so much formal lingo and formalism from the text. I did not even know about indefinite orthogonal group, never understood chiral projections, even twistors and stuff. Pretty good text. I am going to continue reading
This answer will mostly follow this excellent (and quite readable!) paper, pointed out to me by Emilio himself, in the exposition. This is another paper that contains similar considerations. For an extended discussion on this and closely related topics, see this chatroom.
There are a number of p...
@Danu looking at it now. . . and proud to report that after two year I actually know what a "dual" in the case of the question is. . . "Fields" by warren Siegel has really been working wonders in my life lol
@0celo7 Probably for the best. Otherwise you'll just end up spending $10 just to go on social media and say "hey look, I got the interwebz on a plane!"
@kevinTahN. That thing isn't even well-defined in most cases, and getting it to be in the cases where it can be well-defined is pretty hard math, you shouldn't expect there to be something that can compute that algorithmically.
@ACuriousMind yeah you are right. After I actually looked closely and understood how functional integrals and Feynman path integrals work in general, I finally understood why qft is hard lol
@kevinTahN.: If you want to actually compute results with a computer, you'll have to do it numerically - put the theory on a lattice and do a Monte-Carlo simulation, for example.
@ACuriousMind is there a simple reference for say. . something simple like phi^4 . What is the recipe for putting it on a lattice, and how is basic (PI ?)Monte Carlo achieved? If a reference is provided , I would love to try it in C++ or python right now
@Qmechanic At least I think that's what is done in this paper, e.g. for the energy-momentum tensor - eq. (14) and eq. (18) are only arrived at under use of the e.o.m. eq. (9), and yet they "use Noether's theorem" for this.
Weirdly, they refer to Weinberg, which explicitly states that Noether's theorem is supposed to be for variations which are symmetries off-shell.
@kevinTahN. Uh...taking up programming such a simulation is something you should better take up guided by someone experienced in the field - lattice simulations can have many subtleties, and you should not jump right into QFT if you don't have experience with such numerical calculations, I'd say
@ACuriousMind I had a feeling it would be pretty tricky stuff
@Slereah checking it out now
Yeah, I think lattice field theory is something I should take up when I am more mature lol
So I finally understood feynman diagrams after going through Anthony Zee's book.
Is there some simple introduction to how penrose diagrams work. Usually when I encounter them in a text, there is already some background assumed. I have seen experts make predictions by looking at those pictures as if they were sorcerers.
I think my big problem is that I had an aweful math background, and if anything is beyond calculus and basic linear algebra I can't compute things right, unless someone holds my hand through them
My gr background is aweful. Most of the GR texts I attempted to read were hard. Eventually, I just settled on "Mathematics of Relativity" by George Yuri. Pretty much relativity for babies in diapers lol
It Conformal or Penrose diagrams is one of the things I would really love to know. Notice I have not used the word understand, as it might entail learning about some huge number of mathematical stuff. I just want to be able to know where they come from and be able to draw and interpret them. Most of the canonical gr
texts out there are a bit hard for me to self study with. Yuri's text which I mentioned was self contained, explained things rather pedantically (which I love) and assumed I the reader has almost no background. He omits the diagrams though :(