Two new books from Cambridge that are now available:
A First Course in String Theory by Barton Zwiebach, based on a course on string theory for undergraduates taught at MIT. It’s available for \$42 at Barnes and Noble, sales rank 565, for \$60 at Amazon, sales rank 13,559. The whole idea of trying to teach a very speculative theory that hasn’t really worked and which is based on 2d quantum field theory to undergraduates seems to me to be utter lunacy. But maybe I’ll even buy a copy.
Topology , Geometry and Quantum Field Theory, the proceedings of a symposium that I went to at Oxford in 2002 in honor of Graeme Segal’s 60th birthday. This conference had some wonderful talks and I’m looking forward to reading many of the contributions. Supposedly it also contains Segal’s manuscript “The Definition of Conformal Field Theory”, which has been circulating in samizdat for years. My copy (which like many others contains the hand-written notation “Do Not Copy” on the front) is falling apart, yet another reason why I just ordered the book, even though it is \$90. The story I heard is that Segal didn’t want his manuscript reproduced, but finally agreed on the condition that it not be re-typeset, but appear exactly as in the original, so that it would be clear that it was still something preliminary and tentative, with no corrections or improvements made since he wrote it.
Not anywhere I know of. I think what is on-line is what Segal had at the time (99), but don’t know whether he has continued working on writing up these notes or how much progress he has made if so.
Thanks, I wonder where is lecture 4 (mainly CFT)?
Some of Segal’s notes are on-line at
http://www.cgtp.duke.edu/ITP99/segal
His book “Loop Groups”, is about the most amazing math book I know. Worth every penny. His conformal field theory notes are in some sense an extension of this book, although presumably he was never that happy with them, partly probably because soon afterwards Witten came out with his Chern-Simons stuff, which provides yet another perspective on CFT.
So where can we learn about Segal’s real deal online?