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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Lie Groups for Holy Week

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:01 pm

Great line reading in 'Angels and Demons'- 'The God PARTICLE?'

Deep Down Things: The Breathtaking Beauty of Particle Physics, by Bruce A. Schumm, Johns Hopkins University Press, hardcover, Oct. 20, 2004, pp. 94-95–

"In the early 1960s, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology by the name of Murray Gell-Mann interpreted the patterns observed in the emerging array of elementary particles as being due to a symmetry….

Gell-Mann's eightfold way was perhaps the first conscious application of the results of the pure mathematical field of group theory and, in particular, the theory of 'Lie groups,' to a problem in physics."

From the preface–

"I didn't come up with the title for this book. For that, I can thank the people at the Johns Hopkins University Press…. my only reservation about the title is that… it implies a degree of literacy to which I can't lay claim."

Amen.

Remedial reading for those who might have fallen for Schumm's damned nonsense–

 "Quantum Mechanics and Group Theory I," by Dallas C. Kennedy

Group Theory and Physics, by Shlomo Sternberg

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