Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Feynman Integrals

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So, I gave a talk in our little physics seminar today - about the third fourth section of R. Borcherds' lecture notes on Quantum Field Theory, covering the Feynman Path Integral. Now these lecture notes are aimed at mathematicians, so we were fairly happy with the first few sections, establishing a rigorous formal frame that allowed us to write expressions in the same way that physicts do (just don't talk to them about what they mean when writing them).

Unfortunately this section seemed less rigorous and seemed to work on a arguing by similarity basis, which actually has a certain charme but lost us somewhere along the way. We weren't able to successfully dig into everything in the section and do all the computations, but hopefully got some sort of idea about what is going on. Sadly, the promises made at the beginning of the section about what will be explained weren't fully kept - at least not in a way that we understood or saw.

Anyway, this little seminar proves to be quite engaging and interesting. It even spawns discussions during the sessions which are very instructive and seen by far to rarely in maths seminars.

On a very much lighter note, I saw that at kuro5hin they published another installment of their series on Geometric Algebra that I mentioned earlier. It's also related to physics but unlike the QFT stuff much mor digestible.

December 11, 2002, 23:26

Tagged as uni.

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