Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is based on a graduate course taught four times, once in French at the Université de Montréal and then three times in English at the Institut für Theoretische Physik, in Innsbruck, Austria, at the Center for Quantum Spacetime, Department of Physics, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea, and most recently, a part of it at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Cape Town, South Africa. The course covered the contents of the magnificent Erice lectures of Coleman [31], “The Uses of Instantons”, in addition to several chapters based on independent research papers. However, it might be more properly entitled, “The Uses of Instantons for Dummies”. I met Sidney Coleman a few times, more than 30 years ago, and although I am sure that he was less impressed with the meetings than I was and probably relegated them to the dustbin of the memory, my debt to him is enormous. Without his lecture notes I cannot imagine how I would ever have been able to understand what the uses of instantons actually were. However, in his lecture notes, one finds that he also thanks and expresses gratitude to a multitude of eminent and great theoretical physicists of the era, indeed thanking them for “patiently explaining large portions of the subject” to him. Unfortunately, we cannot all be so lucky. Coleman's lecture notes are a work of art; it is clear when one reads them that one is enjoying a master impressionist painter's review of a subject, a review that transmits, as he says, the “awe and joy” of the beauty of the “wonderful things brought back from far places”. But then the hard work begins. Hence, through diligent, fastidious and brute force work, I have been able, I hope, to produce what I believe is a well-rounded, detailed monograph, essentially explaining in a manner accessible to first- and second-year graduate students the beauty and the depth of what is contained in Coleman's lectures and in some elaborations of the whole field itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.524 | 0.362 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".