Quote of the Day
Mar. 5th, 2008 06:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenI am currently reading, and much enjoying, Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe, a very accessible book about superstring theory. It's excellent at conveying some fairly arcane physics in plain language; indeed, about its first quarter is spent on explaining conventional physics, then special relativity, then general relativity, and a very high-level overview of quantum mechanics, so that he can then go on to explain why strings sort out all the problems of reconciling these earlier theories.
However, the footnotes do occasionally make me gibber slightly.
Chapter 6 (still firmly in the introductory matter), note 7:
Well, I mean, of course! One almost has to laugh, really. Or giggle, slightly manically. That's one of the more straighforward ones labelled with the warning phrase "for the mathematically inclined reader".
However, the footnotes do occasionally make me gibber slightly.
Chapter 6 (still firmly in the introductory matter), note 7:
... the association between string vibrational patterns and force charges can be described more precisely as follows. When the motion of a string is quantized, its possible vibrational states are represented as vectors in a Hilbert space, much as for any quantum-mechanical system. These vectors can be labelled by their eigenvalues under a set of commuting hermetian operators. Among these operators are the Hamiltonian, whose eigenvalues give the energy and hence the mass of the vibrational state, as well as operators generating various gauge symmetries that the theory respects. The eigenvalues of these latter operators give the force charges carried by the associated vibrational string state.
Well, I mean, of course! One almost has to laugh, really. Or giggle, slightly manically. That's one of the more straighforward ones labelled with the warning phrase "for the mathematically inclined reader".
