Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my. Hello, you're listening to the Science of Everything podcast, episode 85, quantum field theory.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

So in this episode, we are going to delve into the strange world of quantum field theory,

or QFT, for short.

So this is a particularly advanced topic, and so once again, pre-warning to listeners who might be a bit queasy about advanced physics, but I'm going to try to keep this episode fairly conceptual.

I'm not really going to go into the details of quantum field theory, because it's impossible to do that in an audio podcast.

It's even more essentially mathematical than quantum mechanics is, but it does build on some

similar concepts.

So I do recommend the previous two episodes, Advanced Quantum Theory Part 1 and 2, as recommended pre-listening for this show,

even though it doesn't directly build upon those, it does refer to some of the same concepts.

So it will be beneficial to have listened to those beforehand, and certainly to have

some background in quantum theory.

But really what I'm going to do today is just to go through

some of the key concepts in quantum field theory, basically to explain what quantum field theory

is and why we need it and what the key sort of conceptual breakthroughs or conceptual innovations

of quantum field theory are. So you can understand why it's such an

important theory and sort of what it tells us about reality.

So, in this episode what I'm going to talk about is I'll begin with classical field theory,

a very brief outline of that, and then transition into quantum field theory, explaining what it is and what the key ideas are.

I'll talk about second quantization, so essentially that's the relationship between quantum field theory and regular old quantum mechanics.

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