Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has been more than thirty years since the theory of universal behavior of matter near the points of continuous phase transitions was formulated. Since then the principles and the techniques of the theory of such “critical phenomena” have pervaded modern physics. The basic tenets of our understanding of phase transitions, the concepts of scaling and of the renormalization group, have been found to be useful well beyond their original domain, and today constitute some of our basic tools for thinking about systems with many interacting degrees of freedom. When applied to the original problem of continuous phase transitions in liquids, magnets, and superfluids, the theory is in remarkable agreement with measurements, and often even ahead of experiment in precision. For this reason alone the theory of critical phenomena would have to be considered a truly phenomenal physical theory, and ranked as one of the highest achievements of twentieth century physics. The book before you originated in part from the courses on theory of phase transitions and renormalization group I taught to graduate students at Simon Fraser University. The students typically had a solid prior knowledge of statistical mechanics, and thus had some familiarity with the notions of phase transitions and of the mean-field theory, both being commonly taught nowadays as parts of a graduate course on the subject. In selecting the material and in gauging the technical level of the lectures I had in mind a student who not only wanted to become familiar with the basic concepts of the theory of critical phenomena, but also to learn how to actually use it to explain and compute.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.408 | 0.272 |
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".