Quantum Field Theory: Difference between revisions

|content=“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.” - Feynman

Feynman was not able to simply explain a great deal of things to many people. Including experts. I know that many of you find that shocking.

|content=Even the great Feynman said a great many meretricious things about science. Mostly because he wanted to speak in a powerful and overly simplistic fashion that lay people loved. “Hey, if I can’t understand you, it’s because YOU don’t get it! Ha.”

|content=This is a description of how Feynman’s brilliant “Sum Over Histories” technique went over at the Pocono conference in the spring of 1948. Feynman wasn’t able to explain what he was doing to even the world’s very top experts in Theoretical Physics!

The Internet needs to grow out of its expectation that it can use what is possibly Feynman’s dumbest quote to dismiss those it cannot quickly understand. But it won’t. Why? Because the quote is both powerful and totally wrong.

I look forward to conceding to you. Until then? Maybe go easy on Feynman’s dumbest take?

|content=If you still love repeating that Feynman quote despite the greater context provided, here’s some material. Ask your expository heroes to explain it.

"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."—Richard Feynman. As Quoted in “People”, 22 July 1985.

|content=@karlbykarlsmith Not as I understand it. Feynman’s diagrams are just an indexing scheme for series terms albeit a provocative one. The apparent classical localization of position & momentum is taking place in the indexing diagram, NOT in the quantum propagator which the diagrams sum to construct.

|content=@NukeBeach Ultimately it required more time, more conferences, and Dyson, Bethe, and Wilson to put the full Theory in a form where it was accepted.

|content=@nu_phases @martinmbauer And as per the Renormalization Revolution, a non fundamental result can unlock further fundamental ones as we saw after the late 40s. YM [[Quantum Field Theory|QFT]] wasn’t built in a day after all.  

For the last 10-15 years, Ed Frenkel has been like a one man research department for me to talk about [[Differential Geometry]], Representation Theory, Algebraic Topology/Homotopy Theory, Particle Theory of the [[Standard Model]], [[General Relativity]], Geometric and [[Quantum Field Theory]], Lie Theory, Differential Topology, Elliptic Operators, Category theory, Spinorial Algebra, etc.

Whatever I have needed to discuss across a very broad range of topics, Ed has been able to meet me. I speak from experience: other than another man named David Kazhdan (a coauthor of Ed's), I have not seen this easy ability to switch contexts at a personal level. Edward is not just a remarkable mind, but an extraodinary individual, and friend at multiple different levels.

Ed: Congratulations. I couldn't be more excited for you brother. Looking forward.

|content=UC Berkeley Prof. Edward Frenkel @edfrenkel is one of the world's great mathematical minds.  He has just decided to launch a video-podcast called AfterMath.  

|content=In my opinion, knowing Ed as I do, It certainly has the potential to change everything in the space of high level science communication around both Mathematics and Physics (Particularly Quantum Field Theory).  

Within mathematics Ed is unusually approachable, with collaborative work across film, art, literature, philosophy and psychology. He and I have known each other since Harvard snatched him from the Soviet Union at its bitter end to come to our math department. Years later we reconnected and started going on various adventures in the US and abroad. I believe I even had a breakthrough in my own work when we even spent an entire surreal week completely covered in alkaline dust arguing about cinema and particle theory in a tiny two man tent, with most details mercifully lost to history, vodka and the Burning Man playa.

In any event, it is very uncommon for research mathematicians to use words like 'Genius', but that is probably how Ed struck us American graduate students in the department at the time; an always smiling Russian immigrant of few English words, who seemed to understand everything across the hardest fields almost instantly.  My recollection was that it took him around one year to get a PhD. Something like that.

Ed has since matured into a fine author and public speaker with fantastic command of American English. While he is just getting started on his chanel, he already brings up a great point in his first video that I don't think I ever fully considered and just discussed with him last night: mathematics is not communicated or learned through sensory input. We can build visual models or use symbols, but the actual structures we discover are not sensory in nature. And that this leads to disorientation because in some sense they are built inside the mind without any experience of them having come in (via our senses) from the outside world.

Subscribe to @edfrenkel on @X and on his YouTube channel. This is likely to eventually wend its way up to the most beautiful but otherwise inaccessible science content that we almost never get in the public sphere, presented by a top researcher (rather than a popularizer) at the height of his powers.