Where to learn entry-level particle physics? Like most people, I have been hearing about words like “quarks, hadrons, leptons” since junior high school. However, I have never known the next step for learning more about them. The talk by David Gross during a summer school in Sweden last summer completely aroused interest in this subject.

During the lunar new year season, which was early February this year, I found time to dive into this subject a little. I want to first get an overview of this subject, focusing on building a physical picture and intuitive feelings, avoiding technical details as much as possible. Therefore, I started exploring all kinds of textbooks and videos to searchfor what I want.

Newton and God

In modern people’s mind, science like fundament physics and spirituality (or mysticism) like the Bible are contradictory to each other. From my experience of interacting with my physicist friends and colleagues here in Japan, I think this perception is correct. At least, most physicists aren’t interested in spirituality.

However, there is a very crucial exception. When studying Newtonian physics in high school, I was not satisfied with learning just from the textbook and went on browsing through Newton’s Principia. I was shocked when reading an essay, known as General Scholium, attached to respond some of the criticism to the first edition. There is a whole paragraph saying that one of the purpose of Principia is understanding Lord God:

Quantum Information and error correction by Daniel Gottesman and Artur Ekert

During January to April in 2023, while studying quantum error correction in the textbook reading session of our research group, I discovered several wonderful resources other than Preskill’s notes. I list them below:

• Artur Ekert’s Introduction to Quantum Information on YouTube. I have watched the last part about quantum error correction and I think Ekert’s explanation is the most intuitive one. It is crystal clear. He can use a simple diagram and baby example to make a complicated idea transparent.
• Daniel Gottesman’s and Ben Yoshida’s Quantum Error Correction videos in Perimeter Institute. I think I just finished watching half of them. Gottesman’s exposition of this topic has a different style than Ekert. It is more mathematical, with theorems followed by proofs. I feel these two are good to be watched together. In last lecture by Ben Yoshida, he even explains a fair advanced topic of treating black hole information paradox using the quantum error correction as a tool.
• Daniel Gottesman’s Quantum Information videos in Perimeter Institute. I only watched the last video about quantum channel capacity as a complement to Preskill’s notes. I think Gottesman’s proof is more complete and detailed than Preskill’s notes. I benefited a lot from Gottesman.

Polyakov’s great show in modern classical dynamics

Apart from black hole physics, the other experience that makes my 2023’s physics journey unforgettable is Polyakov’s Modern Classical Physics course, along with various topics inspired by this course. Polyakov uses classical physics to thread several beautiful modern topics together. Here are several examples:

The effect of pandemic decayed away in 2023, so I attended many activities. This is the most dynamical year since the start of graduate school in 2019. I split the summary into two posts. In this first post, I will talk about two travels I had this year and my adventure in black-hole physics.

Traveling aboard: APS Marching Meeting and Quantum Connection summer school in Sweden

The first on-site APS (stands for American Physical Society) March Meeting after the pandemic occurred in Las Vegas. There is no way to miss this opportunity to visit this city, which appears in many movies. What’s more, one of my friends that I met when learning physics course online, a professional poker, Mark Weitzman, is in Las Vegas! He really helped me a lot during my self-study project from 2016 to 2019. It’s a great opportunity to meet him. I also got to meet my first professor in physics, Jim Freericks, during the meeting.

This post continues talking about my summer holiday from August to September. I will talk about movies I watched and books I read.

The Brothers Karamazov

Reading Dostoevsky has always been one of my dreams since 2013, when one of my friends expressed her deep reverence to this great writer, the pioneer of modern psychology, and a great influencer of great philosophies like Nietzsche. However, Dostoevsky’s novels have a reputation for being hard to read, and I indeed got completely lost when reading his Crime and Punishment in 2014. As a result, I have been a little frightened and never dared to try reading him again for almost 10 years.

I finally had a chance to go back to my hometown in this summer after more than three years of the pandemic. After attending one international conference on Statistical Mechanics, I flew back to Shanghai on 18 August. I spent the weekend meeting my friends in Tongji University, and then went back to my hometown on 21 August. I stayed in my parents’ place for about three weeks and returned Tokyo on 10 September.