Content I Consume - 8/4/2024
I’m finishing up my last month in NYC before heading back to Boston to start my senior year. Now, I’m thinking a lot of how to optimize my time to get results out before apply to grad school as well as how to balance my schedule in the fall. For those interested, I’m applying to grad school hoping to work in ML + some kind of particle phenomenology.
Physics
Chapter: The Renormalization Group
The renormalization group (RG) is a key structure in QFTs and theoretical particle physics. Like many advanced topics, it’s hard to find an introduction that’s self-contained. I’ve read many attempts at explaining the RG before, but I don’t think I truly understood the implications of it’s existence before reading this chapter.
The RG is a mathematical description of how fundamental physics changes as the energy of a system changes (in QFTs). RG highlights beautiful aspects of QFTs as well as some necessary issues with developing a theory of everything.
Miscellaneous
Podcast: The Frankfurt School - Erich Fromm on Love
Eric Fromm is relatively unknown philosopher from the mid 20th century. Fromm is a part of a school of thought called the Frankfurt school. This group was predominately Jewish intellectuals feeling Nazi Germany during the start of WWII. Many of these thinkers contain insightful comments on American culture and it’s impacts both at a society and individual level. One of my favorite works from this group is Dialectic of Enlightenment - Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
Fromm’s book, The Art of Loving, dives into his opinion on love in the western world. Below are some excerpts from the podcast that I particularly enjoy,
On the commodification of love:
… if you’re listening to this, and you’re not currently in love, then barring certain exceptions, for most of us every single attempt you’ve made at love has failed … The answer for Fromm is that most of us are using a horrible strategy. And the slogan for that strategy if there was one is that to find love if you’re not currently in love, become more lovable. Go to the gym. Advance your career. Buy some cool clothes…
Fromm thinks all you’ve really done here is turn yourself into a product to be consumed on what he calls the personality market. And how fitting, to Fromm, that in our modern capitalist societies we’d be so inclined to turn our love lives and the love lives of other people into commodities to be marketed, bought, sold, and traded.
On the fundamental problem with love in western society,
Fromm’s idea says nothing about even considering what the other person can do for me. And this leads him to one of the most important ideas in the entire book The Art of Loving—that you will never be able to love any one person until you can love everyone, because you will always be picking and choosing the people you love in terms of what benefits they can provide to you.
nswood
