End of the first week of semester. I’m already tired, I must confess. I think it is mostly a combination of running around doing various things for various projects including another big shoot this week for the science documentary series, and prepping all the publicity for the science film competition, which is now rolling along and gathering momentum, and through it all… the heat. It is just so very hot, and not using air conditioning much and walking and cycling in it to boot does mean that I’m tiring out a bit more. I’ve been waking up with those low level headaches from time to time that signal that I’ve not been cool enough during my sleep, despite having several windows open for throughput. Might have to give up and cool things down a bit with the air conditioning on a thermostat setting of some sort.
So through all that, (and not counting other things like steady progress with a research project, and the drawing here and there that I’ve told you about… oh! and the garden) I’ve also been teaching a course. It is on introductory quantum field theory. I’m happy to say that I’m using Tony Zee’s excellent book Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, that I had the pleasure of reading thoroughly many years ago (and contributing to the blurb on the back of the first edition). It is just as much a delight to read as I recall it to be, and the second edition explores even more topics, so is worth having.
Tony’s written just the perfect book for the type of course I want to teach and the type of audience I am trying to reach, coming from our high energy theory group, our condensed matter group, and our quantum information group, primarily with people from other areas of engineering and chemistry joining in as well. So thanks Tony, for writing such a masterpiece. (I’ve told him in person before, but feel the need to say it again since it is going to -once again- make my semester’s teaching a fun one (I’ve used later bits of it in other classes before, but this is the first time I’m teaching it from chapter one onwards.)
-cvj
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Useful Casimir effect for cheap spacelaunches.
The Casimir effect is traditionally demonstrated by placing two thin parallel plates mere micrometers apart in a vacuum and letting them slam together. The effect is due to vacuum energy. It can in principle be used to modify the vacuum for cheap spacelaunches and efficient space travel, but that requires preventing the plates from slamming together, so that the Casimir effect remains. That can be done by repulsive magnetic fields or by mechanically holding the plates in the edges (only in the edges, to keep the space between them). Another possibility is to abandon the parallel plates altogether and use microchannels or other microscopic holes instead. Anyone is free to build it, I am not going to claim any patent or money.
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C (Carol) to Zee (Zachary)?!!!!! thanks!
Hi Andrew,
It is seldom that I teach a graduate course without using more than one source for supplementing. So we shall see how much I do. I’m very happy that Zee’s book does not end up too cluttered with every detail of computations that can be easily looked up elsewhere since then he makes room for actual understanding instead. (I think that a student at that level should be looking more than one text, anyway. It is a good thing to learn to do.)
Best,
-cvj
I have a bad habit of reading textbooks before I go to bed. I think the best endorsement I can give for Zee’s book is that it is impossible for me to fall asleep while reading it. It is to his credit that he manages to infuse a quantum field theory text with so much energy and enthusiasm.
Do you plan to supplement the discussion of perturbation theory with another text? I’ve found Zee’s book to be much like the Feynman lectures: truly wonderful once you have a grasp of the subject, but difficult for students just learning for the first time, especially when it comes to scattering amplitudes and things like Yang-Mills beta functions. Just curious…