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I will put the TL;DR in the beginning: I need a self-contained, relatively hand-holding sequence of textbooks that covers up from the end of Griffith's Intro to QM to relativistic QM/particle physics to QFT.

This will be my first post. I'm a medical physics grad student who majored in biomedical engineering for my undergrad, with serious regrets about not doing math/physics double major in hindsight. Oh well. I've made it my goal to eventually understand QFT.

My background in relevant subjects is Calc 1 to 3 and Diff EQ, 2 part freshman physics, an E&M course that used Griffiths Electrodynamics, a summer of self studying Griffith's QM (got most of the way through). I will also be officially taking a class in QM using Griffith's textbook this next spring. I am aware of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches to mechanics as well. In addition I have familiarity with special and basic general relativity using tensors and all this. What would be the best way for me to get from where I am now to a strong understanding of QFT autodidactically? I have no aversion to studying pure maths where I need to.

EDIT: My question is much different than simply asking for a handholding explanation of QFT. Generally these textbooks assume a certain amount of physics/math background, and I was asking for a sequence of textbooks leading up to QFT from the end of a specific textbook, Griffith's QM. Did you even read my question? Did you read the thing you linked me to?

Qmechanic
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SSD
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  • Are you going to reopen it? – SSD Dec 15 '15 at 23:03
  • You closed my question without thinking, and close my new one when you fail to reopen my old one. By the time you reopen this question, it will have sank to the bottom of the forum and no one will ever answer it. Can you just admit that you messed up and let me delete the question and repost it please? – SSD Dec 15 '15 at 23:12
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    "fail to reopen" Perhaps you're a little new on this site, but here the process of reopening a question is through a review queue that members with reputation above 3000 have access to. If enough of them vote to reopen your question, it will be reopened. You just have to have a little patience. If it is not reopened, that means the community judged that it was rightfully closed. – Danu Dec 15 '15 at 23:56
  • Danu, thanks for the reply. Yes, I was unaware of that - thanks for pointing it out to me. But is it possible that an insufficient number of people with reputation above 3000 might care enough to read through and check, and will simply assume that it was correctly closed, and therefore an early and thoughtless closure like that of Qmechanic is a death sentence for a perfectly good question? – SSD Dec 16 '15 at 00:37
  • Indeed, something like that is possible. In that case, the best way to go is to bring it up in a post on [meta]. – Danu Dec 16 '15 at 00:42
  • Thanks. Unfortunately I just discovered that I need a reputation of 5 or above to post on Physics Meta. I was pretty stoked to get some answers to this question. Now it looks like I'm done with Physics Stack Exchange. Maybe if Qmechanic values this community, he will not instantly close someone's first post without even reading it properly. – SSD Dec 16 '15 at 00:47
  • SSD, making such "threats" is neither constructive nor an argument to reconsider your case. This site aims to be useful to the many people looking for answers about physics online and aims to attract users that are willing and able to contribute to building such a community/site. If you are so easily discouraged, perhaps you're not the kind of user that this site is made for. It's not hard to gather 5 reputation. One upvote on a post suffices. – Danu Dec 16 '15 at 00:57
  • Would you be so kind? – SSD Dec 16 '15 at 01:01

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