The Landscape of Theoretical Physics: A Global View From Point Particles to the Brane World and Beyond, in Search of a Unifying Principle

This is a book for those who would like to learn something about special and general relativity beyond the usual textbooks, about quantum field theory, the elegant Fock-Schwinger-Stueckelberg proper time formalism, the elegant description of geometry by means of Clifford algebra, about the fascinating possibilities the latter algebra offers in reformulating the existing physical theories, and quantizing them in a natural way. It is shown how Clifford algebra provides much more: it provides room for new physics, with the prospects of resolving certain long standing puzzles. The theory of branes and the idea of how a 3-brane might represent our world is discussed in detail. Much attention is paid to the elegant geometric theory of branes which employs the infinite dimensional space of functions describing branes. Clifford algebra is generalized to the infinite dimensional spaces. In short, this is a book for anybody who would like to explore how the “theory of everything” might possibly be formulated. The theory that would describe all the known phenomena, could not be formulated without taking into account “all” the theoretical tools which are available. Foundations of those tools and their functional interrelations are described in the book. Note: This book was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001. The body of the posted version is identical to the published one, except for corrections of misprints, and some minor revisions that I have found necessary. The Landscape of Theoretical Physics: A Global View From Point Particles to the Brane World and Beyond, in Search of a Unifying Principle THE LANDSCAPE OF THEORETICAL PHYSICS: A GLOBAL VIEW From Point Particles to the Brane World and Beyond, in Search of a Unifying Principle