Is “Group Theory for Physicists in a nutshell” by Zee a good book for self-studying group theory?

@john Depends - if you really want to understand representation theory (which is really what physicists mean by "group theory"), I believe you have to learn it from the mathematicians, but if you want to get the kind of "working knowledge" most physicists have, then books like Zee's are fine.

Hi all, how do you guys read physics textbooks? I find the process of stopping at every equation I don't understand and deriving it before moving on very tiring and slow. Any tips to share?

it really depends on the book and what you want to get from it

@john It's been a while since I studied the subject, but Georgi's book is apparently a classic, though I personally wasn't a big fan. I rather liked Lipkin's "Lie Groups for Pedestrians", was quite a nice book even though the notation was a little weird. But all in all I found Zee's book to be the best, for precisely the reason ACuriousMind mentions: it gives you a working knowledge rather than an in-depth understanding.

@Philip One of my professors also mentioned Georgi’s. I’ll look at both of them

@john I hold that Georgi is terrible, and sad that such a pioneer could not write a more formal presentation of the basics of his work.

See also physics.stackexchange.com/q/6108/36194

grrr...some Outlook update has changed all the custom colors in my calendar, first time I'm actually angry about the proverbial moved cheese :P

@ACuriousMind these computer programmers: they think they know better... ;)

can someone help me with this limit?

How do I justify that this integral in the limit t \to infinity behaves like e^{-imt}?

@ZeroTheHero I am a computer programmer, but you're not wrong :)

@ACuriousMind I knew that...

If I had not there wouldn't been any fun in making the comment... ;)

programming would be so easy if it weren't for all these annoying users

similar to moderating, really :P

D:

spoken like a true university administrator: things would run so much better with no faculty.

(and no students)

in that case I think the faculty often thinks the same about the administrators...

... and faculty of course think that things would be much better without administrators.

Is BRST quantisation considered the strongest (in the sense of being the most rigorous) approach to quantisation in QFT?

@Charlie you can do BRST at varying levels of rigour like everything else in physics, it's just the method you have to use for (non-Abelian) gauge theories because "naive" canonical quantization can't deal with them.

Oh ok that's interesting

hey everyone

Is there a way to organize stars in a room?

Unsure what that means

@DarkVader hi are you a grad student? what is your background? ML in physics is still new. wrt your query general data science refs are a not bad place to start. think cathy obrien is a standout author in the field. looking into cosmology datasets is another direction to go in, someone else was askinga about that recently...

I think if we're talking about gauge theories in general, the BV-formalism is the goddamn cannon

@Charlie in my room I discuss programming and physics with John Rennie sir

my C++ exam is coming up, and some of the stars are quite useful in my room

Ah, that kind of room/stars, what do you mean by "organise"?

I was wondering If I could segeregate the stars into "physics" and "C++"

I think you can bookmark sections of your conversations and label them, maybe that's better

@john yes, maybe give these a try for an idea of what it's like:

Probably something I should write up into an actual question, but maybe I'll probe it a bit first here.. when you have a superconducting metal, far below Tc, are almost all of the electrons then paired up into cooper pairs? I find that hard to imagine, with superconducting gaps being ~meV, but Fermi levels in metals being eV

@user129412 I am a bit rusty but I think I recall that only electrons "close" to the Fermi surface have an effective attractive interaction, and therefore can condense into cooper pairs. So there is no complete condensation even at $T \to 0$. But it's probably worth asking the question.

Unfortunately I never studied superconductivity/BCS very well. It's an embarrassing gap in my knowledge of cond-mat.