PHY854 Syllabus
 
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Instructor/office hours
Professor Raymond Brock
Tu 11am-1pm
www.pa.msu.edu/~brock/
3210 BioPhysical Sciences Building
3.1693
brock@pa.msu.edu
www.pa.msu.edu/~brock/
TA/grading
Qinghong Cao cao@pa.msu.edu  
  BPS  
Classroom
nominally, 1240 BPS Bldg
Class time
nominally, M, W, F 3:00 - 3:50pm;
 

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Textbooks

The history of this field is very interesting and often a focus of attention for historians and philosophers of science. For fun, I list below books written by knowledgable historians, in some cases, physicists.
Conceptual Developments of 20th Century Field Theories
Tian Yu Cao

a philosopher of science from Boston University
How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?
Sunny Y. Auyang

A physicist from MIT

QED and the Men Who Made It
Sylvan S. Schweber


A very senior physicist who wrote one of the first field theory textbooks
 

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Course material / Grading

grading

The grades from the course will be based on problem sets during the semester. There will be no midterm and no final. We may meet during finals week to continue lecture material.

general comments

The course is a broad one based on Relativistic Quantum Field theory and the Standard Model. It will have the following general subjects:

  • The Lie Groups
  • Classical Field Theory
  • Second Quantized Field Theory
  • S-Matrix and Covariant Pertubation Theory
  • Quantum Electrodynamics and Weak Interaction Processes
  • Renormalization in the Pauli-Villars and Dimensional Regularization Formalisms
  • The Standard Model of Weak and Electromagnetic Interactions

Saturday, 10 January, 2004 11:56  
Chip Brock