FYI these notes by david tong contain the clearest explanation of statistical mechanics i’ve ever read, including stuff by feynman and that one blog post by terence tao
damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/stat
Conversation
Replying to
his other notes are delightful also. i think i’m starting to understand what “thinking like a physicist” means. a big part of it appears to be being a good analyst in the sense of knowing what terms can be neglected in an expansion. a lot of physical laws have a tacit “+ O(sth)”
2
18
i was hoping to understand phase transitions in particular and i think i have a bit more of a handle on them now but will need to do some calculations for it to really settle in. feels good tho. this is stuff i’ve wanted to understand for like a decade
1
14
physics is so cute i just can't even
1
2
14
Replying to
I like these two books (see below) and I find that the lecture notes by Y. Oono yoono.org/download/smhyp bridge the gap between Mathematics and Physics fairly decently.
Replying to
The corresponding Tong notes on statistical field theory contain the greatest scientific diagram of all time
4
he has so many other notes too! it's very exciting! i am going to read all of them very quickly and then maybe go back through some of them a second time to actually follow along with the calculations
2
