I was introduced to these ideas in a statistical mechanics class I took in my honours year at an Australian university. The stuff that got me most excited when I took that course were mean-field theory, real-space renormalisation and renormalisation in QFT. I was taking a QFT course at the time, and I found that learning about renormalisation in a statistical field-theoretic context was actually more intuitively appealing.

One thing that took me by surprise, I must say, was to overhear the lecturer of the Stat. Mech. course say the following when asked by an astronomy Masters student about the quality of honours courses at the university:
“… and I think QFT should not be a course that everybody should do, because not many come to make use of it …” (this is a first order approximation of part of his statement).
Wow, I mean, this guy just spent 6 weeks teaching us some basic ideas about QFT, but he actually is against the idea of having a QFT course for honours. Sometimes, it seems, I don’t even understand some physicists…

Too bad it’s entirely too reasonable for Motl to get behind (insert instigator smiley here).

Algebra and trigonometry were developed by in the middle ages by people trying to work with Ptolemies earth-centred-universe, so you can get good spin-offs even if the basic idea turns out wrong in some sense. You’re right that it is definitely a “fantastic” framework!

Cheers,

-cvj

My point here is that “Selected Topics in Particle Physics” includes hep-ph as much as it does hep-th, and there are places where hep-ph gives hints on where hep-th is eventually going to have to go, as hep-ph is more closely tied to hep-ex.

Absolutely, but they had their phenomenology course last semester. I’ll teach them what I have expertise in, and that does not include phenomenology -at least not yet. My job is to teach them the more formal tools that they need… So my selection will be leaning toward those topics. But who knows? We might find ourselves in unexpected waters.

Cheers,

-cvj

We’ve used one degree of freedom. Now choose the interesting pure number:

just a bit below 2/9. You can call that one more degree of freedom, but the number is so close to 2/9 that you might prefer to think of it as 2/9 to first order, with a small correction. Now compute:

Since the cosine is cyclic, there are only three different values for m_n. They are:

Not only are these values good for current experimental measurement (i.e. electron mass known to 10 decimal places, etc.), each is close to dead center in the error bars. At the very least one degree of freedom has been removed from the masses, perhaps two. This is a generalization of the Koide relation.

My point here is that “Selected Topics in Particle Physics” includes hep-ph as much as it does hep-th, and there are places where hep-ph gives hints on where hep-th is eventually going to have to go, as hep-ph is more closely tied to hep-ex.

Now the above formula is not at all explained in current theory (which is devoted to perturbation calculations quite worthless for 10 digit accuracy of particle masses). What your grad students need are topics that fascinate them, subjects that are so interesting that they will sacrifice the time required to pursue them to their ends. The obvious stuff that they can see in the textbooks doesn’t need to be in there.