I finished reading several memoirs of physicists this month. Two are Russian-born physicists, Alexander Polyakov and Alexander Migdal. One is the author of a modern String Theory textbook, Polchinski. I prefer the memoirs of the first two, since they are much more colorful, lively, and interesting. I can feel their unique character behind the text. The early part of Polchinski’s memoir is also not bad, but the later part is a little too technical and hard for me to follow.
Interview of Polyakov
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been studying Polyakov’s Modern Classical Dynamics course since April this year. His lecture style is so charming that I googled his name a lot since April. Then, I found an interview of Polyakov at a Caltech website. For those who are not familiar to the name Polyakov, he is one of the founding father of conformal field theory, a powerful tool to understand critical phenomena in 2D. He also worked many other things which I’m not familiar with.
From this interview, I knew that Polyakov studied quantum field theory by reading a textbook more about the application in Statistical Physics. What’s more, I knew that when learning a subject, Polyakov usually read several textbooks at the same time. This is a useful guidance for me. Professor ‘t Hooft also recommended me this approach during the Sweden summer school last month. The unique feature of Polyakov’s experience is that he worked on field theory and statistical mechanics at the same time; the two objects don’t seem to have apparent connections. I also knew from this interview that Polyakov is a close friend to Migdal. Since my search topic in graduate school is about real-space renormalization group, the name Migdal is very familiar to me due to a famous scheme called Migdal-Kadanoff bond-moving approximation.
Migdal and his lost paradise
It is good to know two big names I knew for some time are actually good friends. So, I googled Migdal a lot and find his memoir on his personal website. I saw lots of old photos with both young Polyakov and Migdal in them. The essay gives me a very poetic feeling, making me think of the Russian-style music, like Tchaikovsky, full of beautiful lines of melodies. His description of Landau institute is so charming that I can imagine that if I were born at that age, I would definitely want to go there! In his essay, you can also saw photos of lots of famous physicists and mathematicians, including Landau, Abrikosov, Heisenberg, Gribov, Kadanoff, Wilson, David Gross, Bogoliubov and Parisi, along with Migdal’s personal stories with them.
V. I. Arnold and his essay, On teaching mathematics
The previous two Russian-born physicists got my very interested in Russian scientists and their style. There is one Russian mathematician whose book is highly related to what I’ve been learning recently—V. I. Arnold. Polyakov mentioned his book many times in his first half of the course series about classical dynamics. Again, I googled his name and found an interesting essay by Arnold called On teaching mathematics. I read the Chinese translation version. I really love the genuine and straightforward style of the essay.
What impressed me most is that I share many of the feeling about the current tendency of “scholastic” way of doing science. My personal analogy of this feeling is that people tend to build skyscrapers without any columns. They just float on the sky, with nothing connecting down to the ground. Arnold used an example to express this feel,
I tried probing people around me. However, it doesn’t bother them at all, which has confused me for a long time. I just don’t understand how people can talk about things they don’t actually feel as a direct experience or don’t have any intuitive feelings about. It is such a relief for me to encounter Arnold’s essay.
Polchinski: Memories of a Theoretical Physicist: A Journey across the Landscape of Strings, Black Holes, and the Multiverse
The book was published last year and is open accessed in MIT Press Direct. I have known his String theory textbook when trying to study it two or three years ago with my friends, Yao and Cao. It was clearly too advanced for me at that time. Even though I couldn’t understand the String Theory, I can try reading Polchinski’s memoir. My another motivation is that I have been interested in physics near black hole horizon since the end of last year and I knew the firewall paradox and Polchinski’s name is always related to this topic.
However, as I said in the beginning, I can only enjoy the first five chapters, which are until his early postdoc time. One interesting fact is that Polchinski also had difficulty understanding quantum field theory when first learning it.
The later part has too much advanced topic about field theory, string theory and elementary particle physics. I should first learn more about these topics before I can enjoy the later parts.
