Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ve been working recently on trying to understand exactly how Wick rotation works in two-dimensional conformal field theory. There is an analog there of some of the issues with Wick rotation of spinors and twistors in four dimensions that I’ve … Continue reading →

The first surprise of this afternoon was finally finding an informed and sensible discussion of the implications of AI agents for hep-th research, in the form of a twitter thread by stringking42069. The second was learning from the twitter thread … Continue reading →

Warning: if you follow this blog, you’ve heard this many times before, so can move on to something more interesting now. There’s a video conversation between Brian Greene and Lenny Susskind from last week here. At 44:02, Susskind has this … Continue reading →

The big AI/math news is the release today of the Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It’s an excellent attempt to identify the new threats to the intellectual culture of the mathematics community and begin a discussion of what … Continue reading →

This posting is mainly intended to provide some links to material about AI in math and physics that I’ve found interesting. I confess that to a large degree I’m trying to avoid seriously learning about exactly what is going on, … Continue reading →

There’s a new paper out on the Formalization of QFT, purporting to formalize a QFT using Lean/Mathlib. I’ve been trying to avoid spending time on the hot topics of AI and theorem proving, but in this case there’s a lot … Continue reading →

I’ve been trying to understand (not entirely successfully yet…) Wick rotation using hyperfunctions, which are a sort of distributions not as well-known as they should be. Some notes about them are in a separate pdf. What is well-known is that … Continue reading →

If one tries to Wick rotate a quantum field theory with spinor fields, it’s well-known that problems arise, something first recognized in Schwinger’s earliest papers on the subject. I’ll try and outline here the 1972 proposal by Osterwalder and Schrader … Continue reading →

This is related to the Osterwalder-Schrader posting, but is much, much more elementary. I’ll write up some basic facts about the quantum harmonic oscillator and explain what bothers me about the relation to Osterwalder-Schrader. Every quantum mechanics course covers the … Continue reading →