{"id":4400,"date":"2012-01-24T10:54:55","date_gmt":"2012-01-24T15:54:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4400"},"modified":"2012-01-24T19:58:43","modified_gmt":"2012-01-25T00:58:43","slug":"an-introduction-to-group-therapy-for-particle-physics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4400","title":{"rendered":"An Introduction to Group Therapy for Particle Physics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The latest CERN Courier book review section is out <a href=\"http:\/\/cerncourier.com\/cws\/article\/cern\/48350\">here<\/a>. Besides a long review of Frank Close&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4181\">The Infinity Puzzle<\/a>, there are some short reviews, including one for Stephen Heywood&#8217;s <em>Symmetries and Conservation Laws in Particle Physics: An Introduction to Group Therapy for Particle Physics<\/em>.  That&#8217;s one I really want to see: I&#8217;m all for symmetries and conservation laws (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4385\">here<\/a>), and <em>Group Therapy for Particle Physics<\/em> (at least for particle theorists) seems like an excellent idea.<\/p>\n<p>This semester I&#8217;m not doing Group Therapy, but I am teaching group theory and representation theory.  The class has started and I&#8217;m trying to write up lecture notes.  One discouraging\/encouraging thing is that looking around the web one finds several places other people have done this better, links are slowly getting added on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/LieGroups-2012\/\">class web-page<\/a>.  The course is mainly aimed at mathematicians, hoping to provide our graduate students the background they need for several different areas, including number theory.  It will however have a physics flavor, with more concentration on topics like spinors, geometric quantization, the Heisenberg algebra and oscillator representation than usual.  The Dirac operator may even put in an appearance, we&#8217;ll see&#8230; <\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>: Turns out there are more books on group therapy in particle physics. See <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Group-Therapy-Physics-Vol-Techniques\/dp\/0121898016\/\">here<\/a> for J.F. Cornwell&#8217;s <em>Group Therapy in Physics, Vol. 1<\/em>.  John Gribbin&#8217;s promotional <em>In search of superstrings<\/em> includes an appropriate appendix on <a href=\"https:\/\/catalyst.library.jhu.edu\/catalog\/bib_2678585\">Group Therapy for Beginners<\/a>. Then there&#8217;s Terry Tomboulis&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/cdsweb.cern.ch\/record\/1015914\">Renormalization Group Therapy<\/a>, which is something different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The latest CERN Courier book review section is out here. Besides a long review of Frank Close&#8217;s The Infinity Puzzle, there are some short reviews, including one for Stephen Heywood&#8217;s Symmetries and Conservation Laws in Particle Physics: An Introduction to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=4400\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4400"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4407,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4400\/revisions\/4407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}