Conformal Field Theories: Review and Scaling

This lecture provides an overview of the upcoming weeks, focusing on four main parts: statistical mechanics, conformal field theories, curved spacetime, and the ADS CFT correspondence. The instructor discusses resources available for learning, including recorded lectures and lecture notes. The lecture delves into the concept of critical exponents, the renormalization group, and the block spin transformation. Through examples like the Ising model, the instructor explains how systems evolve under different scales and how critical exponents play a crucial role in understanding phase transitions. The discussion also touches on the importance of universality and the renormalization group flows in predicting system behavior.