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joao_melo's review
3.0
This is the go-to book to learn about QFT in curved spacetime. It covers just about anything you might need to use in actual research. The explanations are quite clear and they go over many explicit examples in a lot of detail so it's a great reference to learn how to compute things.
The main disadvantage of this book is that it is quite outdated in places. It's view of renormalisation is very much based on cancelling infinities rather than Wilsonian RG. Also, it doesn't mention inflation at all. Which is a shame given a lot of contemporary research on QFT in curved spacetime is motivated by inflation.The physics in chapters 4 and 5 is also quite uninteresting (at least from my point of view), however, some techniques developed here are used later on, so they can't be skipped.
Their discussion of particle detectors is brilliant, very physically motivated and really helps the reader in believing in these phenomena. Chapter 6 on calculating the stress tensor and chapter 9 on dealing with interactions are also unparalleled in terms of clarity of explanation and attention to detail which make them essential for someone who wishes to perform these kinds of computations in practice.
The main disadvantage of this book is that it is quite outdated in places. It's view of renormalisation is very much based on cancelling infinities rather than Wilsonian RG. Also, it doesn't mention inflation at all. Which is a shame given a lot of contemporary research on QFT in curved spacetime is motivated by inflation.The physics in chapters 4 and 5 is also quite uninteresting (at least from my point of view), however, some techniques developed here are used later on, so they can't be skipped.
Their discussion of particle detectors is brilliant, very physically motivated and really helps the reader in believing in these phenomena. Chapter 6 on calculating the stress tensor and chapter 9 on dealing with interactions are also unparalleled in terms of clarity of explanation and attention to detail which make them essential for someone who wishes to perform these kinds of computations in practice.
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