In our opinion, Feynman’s book QED is the golden standard of popular science writing. It is the only book that we know of that explains quantum mechanics in a way that is neither superficial (as in most documentaries you see on TV) nor mathematically sophisticated. In this course, we will read QED and use it as a springboard to discuss topics in modern physics, like path integral methods, Feynman diagrams, and quantum theories of things like E&M, with more mathematical precision. By the end of the course, we will have fascinating answers to simple but deep questions like “why do objects travel in straight paths?”

Statistical physics is about making precise statements about imprecise systems. We might want to describe a gas without writing down the positions and velocities of 10^23 molecules or describe a magnet without keeping track of all the spins of the electrons in the material. We might even want to understand some of the features of black holes without knowing everything (or anything, really) about string theory! We will begin this course by introducing ideas like entropy, the Boltzmann distribution, the partition function, and phase transitions in the context of the Ising model, which describes magnet-like systems. Along the way we will explore applications of these ideas in mathematics and computer science.