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- Newsgroups: sci.physics
- Path: sparky!uunet!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!galois!riesz!jbaez
- From: jbaez@riesz.mit.edu (John C. Baez)
- Subject: Re: Loop variables questions
- Message-ID: <1992Nov17.231421.21358@galois.mit.edu>
- Sender: news@galois.mit.edu
- Nntp-Posting-Host: riesz
- Organization: MIT, Department of Mathematics
- References: <23996@galaxy.ucr.edu>
- Date: Tue, 17 Nov 92 23:14:21 GMT
- Lines: 17
-
- I wrote:
- >Take the matrices
- >
- >1 1+a
- >0 1
- >
- >These are conjugate for all a > 0 but not for a = 0. (This is a good
- >exercise - >they are conjugate by an element of SL(2,C), I mean.)
-
- There's a typo here -- 1+a should've been a.
-
- By the way, Allen's remark that the holonomy of a connection around a
- loop varies smoothly as a function of the loop gives rise to a nice easy
- proof that the "measures" on the space of connections mod gauge
- transformations that arise in Chern-Simons theory (and give link
- invariants) cannot be honest measures. They are most likely generalized
- measures of the sort that frequently appear in quantum field theory.
-