For quite some time I have been entertaining the idea of starting a weblog on higher spin theory. As far as I know, there aren’t any such, and it could be interesting to see what happens if one is started. As you may know, I have been working on the subject, on and off, for many years, in fact since 1983.
The first idea of a blog occurred to me during a higher spin workshop in Florence in 2013, but nothing came of it. I guess I didn’t have the courage to start, and not the time to maintain it active. I had some previous experience in blogging in the context of ‘humanistic mathematics teaching’ — blog pages that are still out there, but not active any longer. But that was much easier. Higher spin is a difficult subject, and I felt I was way behind everything that had happened in the subject since it became rather popular around year 2000.
However, for the last two and a half years, I have been working on a book on higher spin theory, and in this context the blog idea has resurfaced many times. I mentioned it to some people in January last year in Mons, and I at least created the site — but wrote nothing. Still couldn’t muster the courage, and was still concerned about the time it would take.
But now I see it differently. Book writing is a slow process. There are many things to understand and put in context, papers must be read, notation and formalism must be consistent, calculations must be checked and the story must be coherent, et cetera. I’ve come to realize that perhaps writing a post now and then will not take that much time from book writing. Instead it might help book writing.
And indeed, questions crop up all the time. These could be asked in the blog. Ideas crop up all the time. Writing them up in a paper — even a conceptual paper — takes lots of time. Writing them up in post is not that time consuming. And the courage? Well, if I reveal my lack of understanding and misconceptions, that’s something I will have to live with then.
Anyway, hope you will enjoy this, and the first post with content will follow shortly!
Rethinking Higher Spin 