# Tidbits from the High Table of Physics

This evening, I was lucky enough to dine with Brenda Penante, Stephane Launois, Lionel Mason, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Tom Lenagan and David Hernandez. Here for your delectation are some tidbits from the conversation.

• The power of the renormalisation group comes from the fact that the $1$-loop leading logarithm suffices to fix the leading logarithm at all loops. Here’s a reference.
• The BPHZ renormalisation scheme (widely seen in the physics community as superseded by the Wilsonian renormalisation group) has a fascinating Hopf algebra structure.
• The central irony of QFT is thus. IR divergences were discovered before UV divergences and “solved” almost instantly. Theorists then wrangled for a couple of decades over the UV divergences, before finally Wilson laid their qualms to rest. At this point the experimentalists came back and told them that it was the IR divergences that were the real problem again. (This remains true today, hence the motivation behind my work on soft theorems).
• IR divergences are a consequence of the Lorentzian signature. In Euclidean spacetime you have a clean separation of scales, but not so in our world. (Struggling to find a reference for this, anybody know of one?)
• The next big circular collider will probably have a circumference of 100km, reach energies 7 times that of the LHC and cost at least £20 billion.
• The Fourier transform of any polynomial in $cos(x)$ with roots at $\pm (2i+1) / (2n+1)$ for $1 \leq i \leq n-1$ has all positive coefficients. This is equivalent to the no-ghost theorem in string theory, proved by Peter Goddard, and seems to require some highly non-trivial machinery. (Again, does anyone have a reference?)

and finally

• Never, ever try to copy algebra into Mathematica late at night!
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# Mathematica for Physicists

I’ve just finished writing a lecture course for SEPnet, a consortium of leading research universities in the South East of Britain. The course comprises a series of webcasts introducing Mathematica – check it out here!

Although the course starts from the basics, I hope it’ll be useful to researchers at all levels of academia. Rather than focussing on computations, I relay the philosophy of Mathematica. This uncovers some tips, tricks and style maxims which even experienced users might not have encountered.

I ought to particularly thank the Mathematica Summer School for inspiring this project, and demonstrating that Mathematica is so much more than just another programming language. If you’re a theorist who uses computer algebra on a daily basis, I thoroughly recommend you come along to the next edition of the school in September.