Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Followup to Quantum field theory lecture by Tobias Osborne (2017).

When the word "advanced" precedes QFT, you know that the brainrape is imminent!!!

Big goal: explain the Standard Model.

Large but ephemeral storage for EC2 instances. Predetermined by the EC2 instance type. Stays in the local server disk. Not automatically mounted.

Like everything else in Lie groups, first start with the matrix as discussed at Section "Lie algebra of a matrix Lie group".

Intuitively, a Lie algebra is a simpler object than a Lie group. Without any extra structure, groups can be very complicated non-linear objects. But a Lie algebra is just an algebra over a field, and one with a restricted bilinear map called the Lie bracket, that has to also be alternating and satisfy the Jacobi identity.

Another important way to think about Lie algebras, is as infinitesimal generators.

Because of the Lie group-Lie algebra correspondence, we know that there is almost a bijection between each Lie group and the corresponding Lie algebra. So it makes sense to try and study the algebra instead of the group itself whenever possible, to try and get insight and proofs in that simpler framework. This is the key reason why people study Lie algebras. One is philosophically reminded of how normal subgroups are a simpler representation of group homomorphisms.

To make things even simpler, because all vector spaces of the same dimension on a given field are isomorphic, the only things we need to specify a Lie group through a Lie algebra are:Note that the Lie bracket can look different under different basis of the Lie algebra however. This is shown for example at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) page 71 for the Lorentz group.

As mentioned at Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 4 "Lie Algebras", taking the Lie algebra around the identity is mostly a convention, we could treat any other point, and things are more or less equivalent.

Bibliography:

This is a good first concrete example of a Lie algebra. Shown at Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 4.2 "How to linearize a Lie Group" has an example.

We can use use the following parametrization of the special linear group on variables $x$, $y$ and $z$:

Every element with this parametrization has determinant 1:Furthermore, any element can be reached, because by independently settting $x$, $y$ and $z$, $M_{00}$, $M_{01}$ and $M_{10}$ can have any value, and once those three are set, $M_{11}$ is fixed by the determinant.

To find the elements of the Lie algebra, we evaluate the derivative on each parameter at 0:

Remembering that the Lie bracket of a matrix Lie group is really simple, we can then observe the following Lie bracket relations between them:

One key thing to note is that the specific matrices $M_x$, $M_y$ and $M_z$ are not really fundamental: we could easily have had different matrices if we had chosen any other parametrization of the group.

TODO confirm: however, no matter which parametrization we choose, the Lie bracket relations between the three elements would always be the same, since it is the number of elements, and the definition of the Lie bracket, that is truly fundamental.

Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 4.2 "How to linearize a Lie Group" then calculates the exponential map of the vector $x{M}_x+y{M}_y+z{M}_z$ as:with:

TODO now the natural question is: can we cover the entire Lie group with this exponential? Lie Groups, Physics, and Geometry by Robert Gilmore (2008) Chapter 7 "EXPonentiation" explains why not.

Given experiments such as the Fizeau experiment and the Michelson-Morley experiment that couldn't really detect the Earth's movement across aether, people started to wonder if the Earth wasn't dragging the luminiferous aether.

Ciro Santilli is against all affirmative action, except for one: giving amazing free eduction to the poor.

Notably, Ciro is against university entry quotas.

The key and central motivation for studying Lie groups and their Lie algebras appears to be to characterize symmetry in Lagrangian mechanics through Noether's theorem, just start from there.

Notably local symmetries appear to map to forces, and local means "around the identity", notably: local symmetries of the Lagrangian imply conserved currents.

More precisely: local symmetries of the Lagrangian imply conserved currents.

TODO Ciro Santilli really wants to understand what all the fuss is about:

Oh, there is a low dimensional classification! Ciro is a sucker for classification theorems! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_low-dimensional_real_Lie_algebras

The fact that there are elements arbitrarily close to the identity, which is only possible due to the group being continuous, is the key factor that simplifies the treatment of Lie groups, and follows the philosophy of continuous problems are simpler than discrete ones.

Bibliography:

A quote by Ciro's Teacher R.:

If the goals are not ambitious enough, you risk not even having useful side effects so show in the end!

By doing the prerequisites of the impossible goal you desire, maybe the next generation will be able to achieve it.

This is basically why Ciro Santilli has contributed to Stack Overflow, which has happened while was doing his overly ambitious projects and notice that all kinds of basic pre-requisites were not well explained anywhere.

This is especially effective when you use backward design, because then you will go "down the dependency graph of prerequisites" and smoothen out any particularly inefficient points that you come across.

Going into such productive procrastination is also known informally as yak shaving.

There are of course countless examples of such events:

The danger of this approach is of course spending too much time on stuff that will not be done enough times to be worth it, as highlighted by several xkcds:

It is hard to overstate how low the level of this conference seems to be at first sight. Truly sad.

Generative adversarial network illustrates well AI brittleness. The input looks obvious for a human, but gets completely misclassified by a deep learning agent.

Group of students that represent students academic views about the courses.

A way to write the wavefunction $\psi (x)$ such that the position operator is:i.e., a function that takes the wavefunction as input, and outputs another function:

If you believe that mathematicians took care of continuous spectrum for us and that everything just works, the most concrete and direct thing that this representation tells us is that:equals:

This is a general principle of software/hardware design that Ciro feels holds wide applicability.

The most extreme case of this is of course the integrated circuit itself, in which it is essentially impossible (?) to observe the specific value of some indidual wire at some point.

Somewhat on the other extreme, we have high level programming languages running on top of an operating system: at this point, you can just GDB step debug your program, print the value of any variable/memory location, and fully understand anything that you want. Provided that you manage to easily reach that point of interest.

And for anything in between we have various intermediate levels of complication. The most notable perhaps being developing the operating system itself. At this level, you can't so easily step debug (although techniques do exist). For early boot or bootloaders for example, you might want to use JTAG for example on real hardware.

In parallel to this, there is also another very important pair of closely linked tradeoffs:

Emulation also has another potential downside: unless you are very careful at implementing things correctly, your model might not be representative of the real thing. Also, there may be important tradeoffs between how much the model looks like the real thing, and how fast it runs. For example, QEMU's use of binary translation allows it to run orders of magnitude faster than gem5. However, you are unable to make any predictions about system performance with QEMU, since you are not modelling key elements like the cache or CPU pipeline.

Instrumentation is another technique that has can be considered to achieve greater observability.