QFT: A Beginner's Guide
Alex Lin
Among the dazzling world of high-energy physics, quantum field theory is undoubtedly the most fundamental, yet one of the most difficult to learn. Unlike general relativity, which is built upon a few postulations and consistent thought experiments, QFT is a maze, hiding its real physics beneath complicated technical details. Such complexity is a reflection of the struggles of physicists in the early 1900s, who constantly encountered dead ends and eventually pieced together people's understanding of particles into a complete, special-relativity-compliant theory. New QFT learners often find themselves lost in all the unfamiliar concepts, slowly and painfully building up their intuition. The purpose of this note is to go over the important pictures in QFT, to help confused QFT learners as much as I can.