Dealing with burn out in undergrad

[porcupine137]

Another two:

1) "The Conceptual Framework of Quantum Field Theory" by Duncan
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199573263/?tag=pfamazon01-20

2) "Quantum Field Field Theory and the Standard Model" by Schwartz
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1107034736/?tag=pfamazon01-20

Folks are speculating that Schwartz could replace Peskin and Schroeder as the most-used QFT text for grad-level courses.

Yeah I heard good stuff about Schwartz too and the Duncan books looks potentially interesting.

 

[homeomorphic]

People who are always saying that anyone who ever points out anything wrong with anything just needs to suck it up are obstacles to making any progress in society. If you are just supposed to suck everything up, then there is no such thing as anything being wrong with anything and therefore there is no such thing as progress or any improvements. To think that our educational system and every class is 100% perfect is pretty ridiculous, to put it mildly.

Thousands of people are making math (and physics) much more boring than it needs to be. That's my big pet peeve in life. Am I going to just sit there and take it or am I going to try to fight back and change things for the better, instead of falsely telling myself that that's just the way it needs to be? Take a wild guess. The people who sit there and take it will be cogs in the machine and those who are crazy enough to think they can make a difference, well, some of them may fail, but some of them will have changed the world.

 

[atyy]

I think it might just be that I find HEP theory extremely boring. I've been spending a rather small amount of time reading Altland's condensed matter field theory text which basically introduces QFT through stat mech and it's extremely interesting and joyous to read. HEP might just be too bland for my tastes.

I can't give up self-studying GR/stat mech through because apart from the fact that I need to keep reading GR papers etc. to keep up with research, this is also what keeps me sane and passionate for physics. But I'll do what you said and try consulting other books like Schwartz much more often!

I myself learned QFT more from stat mech/condensed matter. But just for the sake of discussion, I think one can find calculations in stat mech and condensed matter just as tedious as in Peskin and Schroeder QFT. Try the $\epsilon$-expansion for example, or look at Mahan's "Many-Particle Physics" . To motivate yourself that Peskin and Schroeder isn't that bad, I suggest working through Wilson's (brilliant) paper on the Kondo effect. I don't think anyone thinks the calculations are not tedious, especially since they have to use a computer to calculate enough Feynman diagrams to match the most precise g-2 measurements.:)

Anyway, I think there are interesting things in QFT eventully like the Kadanoff block spin picture and Wilson's view of renormalization. I guess the problem is that Wilsonian renormalization is core in statistical field theory, but is postponed in HEP QFT because they want you to master the tedious calculations. There should be lots of interesting things later in QFT like using BRST to quantize gauge fields, and lattice gauge theory, where the big problem of chiral fermions that interact with non-abelian gauge fields is still unsolved (not even known whether a solution does or does not exist).

 

[homeomorphic]

There may be unavoidably boring aspects of some subjects, but I think if you strategically approach them, you can put them in a context where you minimize the boredom. I always thought Lagrange's calculations as a precursor to Galois theory were horrendously ugly, and they are, but once you grasp the underlying idea, you realize the big picture of it is kind of cool, the idea being that when you apply a DFT (a reversible operation) to the roots of an equation, it becomes easier to symmetrize (which is the reverse of the symmetry-breaking operation of finding roots of a polynomial) the resulting expressions in a way that might be reversible. So, the idea is beautiful, even though actually carrying it out for the quartic and seeing how it fails for the quintic is astoundingly tedious and ugly. High energy always looked interesting enough from my math refuge where I was safe from all of the detailed calculations, which is essentially why I did a math PhD, rather than physics. But of course, the result is that I don't really know high energy physics, just some of the cool math spin-offs that came out of it and a general idea of roughly where they fit into the physics picture.

If I were going to try to learn QFT, I'd try to really master Feynman and Hibbs path integral book, with its nice physical intuition (it gets to some QED towards the end), and there's an interesting approach of Baez and Dolan using category theory (sounds like a bunch of mathematical BS--there are some people I have heard of who think calculus makes more sense from a category theory viewpoint, which is a little wacky, but you might find it really enlightening if you dig into it) to conceptualize Feynman diagrams that I'd like to work out more fully some day:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/qg-fall2003/

 

[yoron]

Reading you guys. It's hard work, manual labor, and doing what you did psparky is not to be scoffed at. Still, studying really hard subjects is also work, and it's not impossible to get burnt out. You could as easily have gotten there from manual labor too, being unlucky in work mates, boss, etc. I don't really think it matter, what work it is, when you arrive to this state. Being young, dreaming and expecting a lot of good stuff to happen, yet being stuck for years in a school is not the perfect solution of what life should be to me. And a lot would depend on the teachers ability to make a course interesting there. That means they have to have a active interest in their students, inviting them to participate. It's just stupidity assuming a course to be sufficient if that is lacking.

So Wannabe, I sympathize with you, it's not easy at that level, especially if you can't find a way to make it live and breath for you. Maybe that is what you need to do, find a way for it to unfold into something living. And there reading other books is a really good idea, and maybe invite someone more to study with you, someone that enjoys the subject and can discuss it.