I've been banging my head on QFT and the Standard Model for enough time now that I can actually glimpse more or less what those terms actualy mean, as in , I can translate them into words. It's almost like learning a new language! Pretty awesome.

Still, despite all this complexity, we still have several minor and major theoretical gaps to fill. Exciting times!

I would love to see this article, about 5-10 times longer. Dig one level deeper into what the notation means, how it relates to the zoo of fundamental particles, etc. Compare and contrast the sections dealing with different forces/particles. Talk something about the history of how this came out as a unification of models for gravity, electricity and magnetism, weak force, strong force.

I love how everybody uses Gutierrez's typesetting. If I ever meet him and have the presence of mind to put two and two together, I'll buy him a beer.

If you want the TeX source for your own purposes, it's here: http://nuclear.ucdavis.edu/~tgutierr/files/stmL1.html

What is the sum of terms supposed to be equal to?

"To clean up these redundancies, theorists use virtual particles they call ghosts.

This part of the equation describes how matter particles interact with Higgs ghosts, virtual artifacts from the Higgs field. [...] This last part of the equation includes more ghosts. These ones are called Faddeev-Popov ghosts, and they cancel out redundancies that occur in interactions through the weak force."

So the second half this equation is used to describe invisible things needed to cancel out wrong stuff from the first half? Sounds ad hoc to me, were these "ghosts" predicted by anyone beforehand? Even if not, as a model it can still be useful though.

"Note: ...In Gutierrez’s dissemination of the transcript, he noted a sign error he made somewhere in the equation. Good luck finding it!"

Anyone see the flipped sign?

Given the world we live in, right now, why does mathematics continue to insist on minified expressions?

Given the option, most development teams would choose to read and write against verbose source code, rather than scrape obfuscated variables and method signatures out of a minified, transpiled, compressed package.

So why do we continue this archaic practice of obscure, inscrutable symbols in mathematics? Cultural inertia?

The cycle of madness must end!

Am I correct in understanding that this takes every kind of interaction that particles can have, and simply adds them all together?

How does it deal with some particles only interacting in certain ways and not others? Is the user of the equation supposed to make sure to enter zero for those terms, or does the equation capture that knowledge as well?

I haven't seen an article so math intensive in a while... since I saw this one: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bayesian_Ying_Yang_learn...

If I was a physics phd working on QFT, I would tattoo this equation as a sleeve. Unfortunately, as a mere programmer, I could never pick a sufficiently perfect code snippet to use. I would constantly look at it and try to refactor it.

There must be some smarter notation that captures the model with less verbosity?

Also, how on earth did various people put this together? Is there a good book about it?

Well, when you put it like that... suddenly it all makes sense :p

Seriously though, very neat to see the actual equation used to model the universe.