From owner-freebsd-chat  Sat Feb  3  4:29:12 2001
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Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 13:29:10 +0100
From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>
To: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
Cc: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: quote about open source
Message-ID: <20010203132910.K94275@lpt.ens.fr>
Mail-Followup-To: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>,
	Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG
References: <20010202151744.O38235@lpt.ens.fr> <200102022305.QAA16383@usr08.primenet.com> <20010203040747.B35712@xor.obsecurity.org>
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In-Reply-To: <20010203040747.B35712@xor.obsecurity.org>; from kris@obsecurity.org on Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 04:07:47AM -0800
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Kris Kennaway said on Feb  3, 2001 at 04:07:47:
> On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 11:05:58PM +0000, Terry Lambert wrote:
> 
> > waving.  Even today, unless you take your QED classes from an
> > extremely enlightened professor, you are likely to not ever hear
> > about Clifford algebras, and even get a theoretical physics
> > degree, without laying your hands on this important tool.
> 
> Umm, I'm not sure how you could learn QED without encountering a
> clifford algebra. That's essentially the defining relation of spinor
> fields (fermions), i.e. they carry a representation of the clifford
> algebra:
> 
> \{ \psi^\mu, \psi^\nu \} = \eta^{\mu\nu}

That's right, I remember.  I'd forgotten the name (one hardly uses
this stuff in condensed matter...) but this is as fundamental to
QED/relativistic quantum mechanics as the usual commutation relations
are to ordinary quantum mechanics... and is surely older than Feynman
or Dyson.  Probably Dirac.

R


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