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
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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)”
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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
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physics is so cute i just can't even
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I don't know how much background you have but tong's qft notes are awesome. if you study long enough, you'll see how ideas of phase transitions are intertwined with particle physics. pure ecstasy