Motl on Baez
I have mentioned before that Luboš Motl was my original provocation for starting a blog. In honor of that, I try to reference his stuff pretty frequently, but lately most of his posts have been sour missives from the Crazytown School of Climate Science. Fortunately, he now has up this article on John Baez's recent This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 230).
Motl's post is rather muddled and distorted in its decription of Baez's article, and is also warped by a juvenile attack on Baez and Peter Woit, though the technical part about string theory might be useful to those who know enough algebra and strings. John Baez's article, though, is a typically facinating introduction to many interesting facets of math.
Baez is one of the best, and probably the very best, expositors of mathematical physics. He almost always includes some bits that are intelligible to even the slightly mathematically educated.
Baez once advised every aspiring mathematical physicist to buy the two volumes of Analysis, Manifolds, and Physics by Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat and Cecile Dewitt-Morette, and keep it at his/her bedside until the entire contents were mastered. I only have volume one by my bedside, and somehow, every time I get to page 15, I feel my eyes closing, so clearly I wasn't meant to be a mathematical physicist.
Motl's post is rather muddled and distorted in its decription of Baez's article, and is also warped by a juvenile attack on Baez and Peter Woit, though the technical part about string theory might be useful to those who know enough algebra and strings. John Baez's article, though, is a typically facinating introduction to many interesting facets of math.
Baez is one of the best, and probably the very best, expositors of mathematical physics. He almost always includes some bits that are intelligible to even the slightly mathematically educated.
Baez once advised every aspiring mathematical physicist to buy the two volumes of Analysis, Manifolds, and Physics by Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat and Cecile Dewitt-Morette, and keep it at his/her bedside until the entire contents were mastered. I only have volume one by my bedside, and somehow, every time I get to page 15, I feel my eyes closing, so clearly I wasn't meant to be a mathematical physicist.
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