Unfortunately I don’t have time now to write about the three following books at the length that they deserve, but here are some quick comments on three books worth your attention:<\/p>\n
David Kaiser has contributed an introduction to the book (available here<\/a>, or, if this doesn’t work, try here<\/a>) which does an excellent job of putting the material in historical and intellectual context, as well as describing what Coleman was like and why he had a huge influence on several generations of Harvard students. If you’ve already spent a lot of time learning QFT from various modern textbooks, your reaction to much of this one may be “that’s the standard way of explaining that point, nothing unusual here.” Keep in mind that often the reason that’s now the standard way of explaining things is that many authors of modern textbooks learned the subject from Coleman (or from someone who learned it from Coleman…).<\/li>\n One unavoidable topic that Baggott covers is the relation of string theory and LQG as competing (or perhaps someday collaborating?) approaches to the problem of quantum gravity. Due to long ago experience (to get an idea, watch this<\/a>), I’ve long ago lost patience for arguments about which approach is “better”. Baggott’s take on the issue seems fair to me, but if you really want to engage in that argument it will have to be elsewhere than the comment section here.<\/li>\n Update<\/strong>: I should have included links to postings about Coleman here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Update<\/strong>: If you’ll be at the March APS meeting in Boston, I hear there’s a book launch for the Coleman book, 1:30pm-2:15pm Weds. March 6, at the World Scientific booth in the exhibition hall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unfortunately I don’t have time now to write about the three following books at the length that they deserve, but here are some quick comments on three books worth your attention: A carefully produced detailed write-up of Sidney Coleman’s Harvard … Continue reading