[内容简介]I envisaged a relatively thin book, thin at least in comparison with the many weighty tomes on the subject. I envisaged the style to be breezy and colloquial,and the choice of topics to be idiosyncratic, certainly not encyclopedic. I envisaged having many short chapters, keeping each chapter "bite-sized.".The challenge in writing this book is to keep it thin and accessible while at the same time introducing as many modern topics as possible. A tough balancing act!In the end, I had to be unrepentantly idiosyncratic in what I chose to coven Note to the prospective book reviewer: You can always criticize the book for leaving out your favorite topics. 1 do not apologize in any way, shape, or form. My motto in this regard (and in life as well), taken from the Ricky Nelson song "Garden Party,"is "You can't please everyone so you gotta please yourself."..This book differs from other quantum field theory books that have come out in recent years in several respects. ...

[目次]PART Ⅰ MOTIVATION AND FOUNDATION
Ⅰ.1 Who Needs It?
Ⅰ.2 Path Integral Formulation of Quantum Physics
Ⅰ.3 From Mattress to Field
Ⅰ.4 From Field to Particle to Force
Ⅰ.5 Coulomb and Newton: Repulsion and Attraction
Ⅰ.6 Inverse Square Law and the Floating 3-Brane
Ⅰ.7 Feynman Diagrams
Ⅰ.8 Quantizing Canonically and Disturbing the Vacuum
Ⅰ.9 Symmetry
Ⅰ.10 Field Theory in Curved Spacetime
Ⅰ.11 Field Theory Redux
PART Ⅱ DIRAC AND THE SPINOR
Ⅱ.1 The Dirac Equation
Ⅱ.2 Quantizing the Dirac Field
Ⅱ.3 Lorentz Group and Weyl Spinors
Ⅱ.4 Spin-Statistics Connection
Ⅱ.5 Vacuum Energy, Grassmann Integrals, and Feynman Diagrams for Fermions
Ⅱ.6 Electron Scattering and Gauge Invariance
Ⅱ.7 Diagrammatic Proof of Gauge Invariance
PART Ⅲ RENORMALIZATION AND GAUGE INVARIANCE
Ⅲ.1 Cutting Off Our Ignorance
Ⅲ.2 Renormalizable versus Nonrenormalizable
Ⅲ.3 Counterterms and Physical Perturbation Theory
Ⅲ.4 Gauge Invariance: A Photon Can Find No Rest
Ⅲ.5 Field Theory without…