Geto’s house.
Denenchofu 5-Chome, Ota-ku City, Tokyo.
(I got incredibly lucky and found a house that matches exactly how I pictured Suguru's home—same architecture, same neighbourhood, even the exact location I had in mind. The only downside is that it's a real-estate listing, so it's completely empty and unfurnished. I always imagined his house as very traditional and but barely lived-in, so I included a few aesthetic pictures to convey the vibe I had in mind.)
Psychogenic erectile dysfunction, and how the Watersports Tag on AO3 has been lying to us.
When I first started planning 𝐦𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐜𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐢𝐬—back when it was still just the hospital AU in a collection of increasingly unhinged notes—I genuinely believed the hardest part would be writing the first act in Third Person Objective, a point of view that has become almost endangered in modern fiction and is practically mythical in fanfiction.
It turns out I was spectacularly wrong.
The hardest part has been writing medically accurate smut.
This doesn't mean medicine makes sex less interesting.
Quite the opposite.
Medicine has the infuriating habit of making everything substantially more complicated than fanfiction has led me to believe.
Unfortunately for both me and my readers, my brain refuses to write something medically inaccurate simply because it would be sexier, or because it's how the trope usually works, or because everyone will happily suspend their disbelief once somebody's trousers come off.
If I decide a character has psychogenic erectile dysfunction, then I need to know exactly how psychogenic erectile dysfunction works.
Once it was pointed out to me that urination does not work the way I thought, I needed to know whether a healthy thirty-eight-year-old man can realistically urinate while sexually aroused.
If the answer turns out to be "not in the way AO3 has been enthusiastically suggesting for the last fifteen years," then I have to rewrite the scene.
Even if it means killing all my darlings.
This chapter is almost certainly going to generate questions about psychogenic erectile dysfunction, because it behaves very differently from the way popular culture tends to portray erectile dysfunction.
So, since I've already spent an unreasonable amount of time learning more about penises than I ever anticipated, I might as well inflict that knowledge on Tumblr.
Welcome to our first lecture:
Psychogenic erectile dysfunction: or, why the brain is a spectacularly inconvenient organ.
Featuring:
the brain, unfortunately;
why attraction and erections are not the same biological process;
why erections are considerably more complicated than most of us think;
and how exactly Suguru was able to fill Satoru with cum (why people with psychogenic ED can still orgasm and ejaculate)
If I asked you to explain how an erection works, I suspect most people—including me, before I started writing this fic—would produce some version of:
➡️Person gets turned on. ➡️Penis gets hard.
Which is, medically speaking, a bit like explaining open-heart surgery as "the doctor fixes the heart."
Technically true. Spectacularly incomplete.
First, let's break out the anatomy and definitions and what is what and what is in charge of what:
They usually happen together.
They are not the same thing.
This distinction is the entire reason psychogenic ED is interesting.
Desire (libido)
Desire is primarily a psychological and neurological process.
It is the experience of wanting sexual activity, whether directed towards another person or experienced as fantasy or spontaneous sexual thoughts.
It is influenced by the brain, hormones (particularly testosterone), emotional state, relationship dynamics, stress, medications, culture and approximately seven thousand other variables the human brain insists on introducing into the conversation.
Erection
An erection is primarily a vascular event.
When a person becomes sexually aroused:
The brain sends signals down the spinal cord.
Parasympathetic nerves release nitric oxide.
Arteries supplying the erectile tissue dilate.
Blood fills the erectile tissue.
Veins are compressed, trapping blood.
Orgasm
An orgasm is primarily a neurological event.
It involves:
Intense activation of reward pathways.
Rhythmic muscle contractions.
Massive autonomic nervous system activity.
Release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins.
The subjective feeling of orgasm comes from the brain processing all of this sensory input.
You can have:
An erection without orgasm.
An orgasm without a strong erection.
In some cases, an orgasm without ejaculation.
These systems often occur together, but they are not identical.
Ejaculation
Ejaculation itself has two phases.
1. Emission
Semen is moved into the urethra by contractions of:
The vas deferens.
Seminal vesicles.
Prostate.
This phase is largely controlled by the sympathetic nervous system.
2. Expulsion
Pelvic floor muscles contract rhythmically and force semen out through the urethra.
This is the part people usually experience as the climax of ejaculation.
Notice that neither phase fundamentally requires the penis to be rigid.
An erection usually makes ejaculation easier and more effective, but the muscular machinery that produces ejaculation is separate from the vascular machinery that produces erection.
As pointed out before, an erection is not a conscious decision.
It is a neurological, vascular, hormonal and psychological process that requires your brain and spinal cord and blood vessels and smooth muscle and autonomic nervous system to cooperate for approximately five minutes without anyone panicking.
That last part turns out to be surprisingly difficult.
So, this is how erections come into existence: they all start in the brain.
Then the autonomic nervous system gets involved.
Then nitric oxide gets released.
Then smooth muscle inside the corpora cavernosa relaxes.
Then arterial inflow increases dramatically.
Then venous outflow is mechanically compressed so the blood can't easily leave again.
Only after all of that do you (or penis haver people) end up with something we casually refer to as "an erection".
Which also means there are about seventeen different places where the process can be interrupted.
Psychogenic ED doesn't mean the penis has stopped functioning. It means one part of an extraordinarily complicated pathway has become unreliable.
It means there is no obvious structural problem preventing erections.
The blood vessels may be perfectly healthy.
The nerves may be perfectly healthy.
Hormone levels may be perfectly normal.
The penis itself may be perfectly healthy.
The problem is that the brain—an organ which famously enjoys catastrophising—is interrupting the process.
Which brings me to my favourite sentence in urology: You can desperately want someone, be wildly attracted to them, think they're the most beautiful person you've ever seen, and still experience erectile dysfunction.
Those things are not contradictory.
Because attraction and erections are not the same biological process. They aren't even on the same axis.
Desire lives mostly in your brain.
An erection is a vascular event initiated by your nervous system.
One can exist quite happily while the other is having what can only be described as a software crash.
People with psychogenic ED often still experience:
• normal libido (they still want sex)
• sexual fantasies
• arousal
• increased heart rate
• flushing
• butterflies
• pre-ejaculatory fluid ("precum")
• orgasm
• ejaculation
Yes.
You read that correctly. You can orgasm without having a full erection.
This surprises almost everyone.
An erection is not a prerequisite for orgasm. Nor is it a prerequisite for ejaculation.
They're related.
They're just not the same physiological process.
Likewise, erections aren't binary. They aren't simply: OFF ❌ ON ✅
They're a spectrum.
Some people become partially erect.
Some lose rigidity during intercourse.
Someone might be fine until they suddenly remember they're supposed to be having an erection.
Some can get erect, orgasm and ejaculate through masturbation without problem, the problem begins during partnered sexual activities.
The moment attention shifts from their partner to their own performance, the sympathetic nervous system (our lovely fight-or-flight response) starts getting involved. It interfers with parasympathetic functions.
Morning erections are one of the reasons physicians become suspicious of psychogenic rather than organic ED.
Because if your body is perfectly capable of producing erections while you're asleep, the plumbing is probably functional.
Which means physicians start looking less at the penis and much more at everything attached to it.
Namely: the brain.
Which is why the least glamorous questions you'll ever be asked by a physician are:
Do you wake with erections?
Can you maintain one during masturbation?
Can you orgasm?
Do you ejaculate?
When exactly does the erection diminish?
Because they're trying to identify which part of the pathway is still working.
Unfortunately, the brain now performs the following algorithm:
Didn't get erection ➡️ Worries about next erection ➡️ Thinks about erection during sex ➡️ Doesn't get erection ➡️ Worries harder.
It's an extraordinarily well-designed vicious cycle.
The good news is that psychogenic ED is treatable.
Not, it doesn't get cured by telling somebody simply needs to "relax".
(I would personally like to ban those words forever.)
Once organic causes have been ruled out, treatment can target the cycle itself through therapy, medication when appropriate, addressing relationship dynamics, performance anxiety, trauma, depression, grief, stress, or whatever is actually driving the interruption.
Whoever designed that system made some fascinating decisions.
Since we are already discussing penises, let's talk about another thing that I somehow reached adulthood without ever properly thinking about.
Urination.
Or, more accurately: Can men urinate while erect?
Technically? Yes.
Comfortably? Absolutely not.
Welcome to our next topic:
How fanfiction, pornography, and the AO3 Watersports tag have been lying to me.
Featuring:
the brain, again;
and interrogaring a very tired urologist.
When I started outlining this chapter, I had one very simple assumption:
Surely urinating during sex can't be that complicated.
Reader.
It is.
If you, like me, have occasionally wandered into the Watersports tag on AO3, you've probably read scenes where Character A, overcome by lust and impeccable bladder control, enthusiastically urinates on Character B somewhere around the emotional climax of the smut.
I accepted those scenes as fact for years.
Then it was pointed out to me that men, as a matter of fact, cannot urinate like that. After I cried my heartbreak dry, I spent several weeks reading urology papers, asking increasingly deranged questions on medical forums, and eventually paid actual money to sit in front of a very patient—and increasingly tired—urologist whose job, apparently, now included answering questions such as:
"Hypothetically, how much stimulation would a healthy thirty-eight-year-old man require to urinate during penetrative sex?"
By about the tenth question, he had acquired the expression of a man wondering whether I was writing a novel or preparing for an exceptionally niche crime.
Anyway.
Here are my findings.
So, why is urinating while erect so awkward?
Once again, we can blame the autonomic nervous system. The brain!
During sexual arousal, the sympathetic nervous system closes the internal urethral sphincter, a ring of smooth muscle located at the bladder neck.
Its primary job is elegant enough: when ejaculation occurs, it prevents semen from travelling backwards into the bladder—a phenomenon called retrograde ejaculation.
As a convenient side effect, it also prevents urine from entering the urethra while the reproductive system is preparing for ejaculation.
Your body is, essentially, committing fully to one project.
The result is that urination during an erection becomes slower, weaker, mechanically awkward and, for many men, surprisingly difficult. It often requires consciously relaxing muscles that the nervous system is actively trying to keep contracted.
And then there is the purely engineering problem.
An erect penis generally points somewhere between slightly upwards and directly at the ceiling.
Gravity, unfortunately, has not agreed to participate.
So even if someone does manage to urinate while erect, the stream is often weaker, less predictable, and considerably harder to aim than fanfiction has led me to believe.
Human anatomy occasionally displays astonishing engineering.
This is not one of those occasions.
Which brings us to the next question.
Can men urinate and ejaculate at the same time?
Under normal circumstances? No.
Technically? Yes.
Physiologically? Very, very unlikely.
Once sexual arousal reaches the point where ejaculation is becoming possible, your autonomic nervous system has already made a decision.
It is prioritising reproduction.
The internal urethral sphincter closes, the bladder is effectively taken out of the equation, and the entire lower urinary tract is reorganised around one objective: getting semen out, not urine.
I find it helpful to imagine it like railway points.
One track carries urine. The other carries semen.
The nervous system is standing beside the tracks enthusiastically pulling levers to make absolutely sure the train only ends up on one line.
The tracks are not designed to be open at the same time.
There are, naturally, exceptions.
Neurological disorders.
Spinal cord injuries.
Certain pelvic operations.
Some medications.
Severe bladder dysfunction.
But in an otherwise healthy urinary system, urinating and ejaculating simultaneously is something your body is actively trying to prevent.
Which naturally led me to ask my poor urologist a series of increasingly alarming questions.
1. Could a man stay erect after ejaculation simply because he desperately needed to urinate?
Surprisingly... Not really.
A very full bladder can contribute to erections—particularly morning erections—but it is rarely powerful enough to maintain an erection after ejaculation all by itself.
Once ejaculation occurs, the body enters what physicians call the resolution phase.
Blood begins leaving the erectile tissue.
The penis gradually becomes flaccid.
The refractory period begins.
All of this is driven by changes in the nervous system and circulating neurochemicals, not by bladder fullness.
1.1 Could there be exceptions?
Of course.
A younger man may lose his erection more slowly.
Someone who remains intensely psychologically aroused.
Someone who continues receiving stimulation.
Someone who didn't experience a complete orgasm.
Or someone with neurological conditions or medications affecting erectile function.
Medicine almost always has exceptions.
But the bladder itself is generally not enough to keep the entire erection mechanism switched on.
Which, inevitably, led me to my final and perhaps most unhinged question.
2. Hypothetically... what would it take for a healthy thirty-eight-year-old man to urinate during penetrative anal sex?
The answer, disappointingly for AO3, is:
Probably more than penetration alone.
The prostate sits immediately below the bladder and surrounds part of the urethra.
Anal penetration can absolutely stimulate it.
Many people describe prostate stimulation as producing:
pressure behind the penis
an increased awareness of the bladder
a sensation remarkably similar to needing to urinate
Which explains why so many people feel as though they're about to pee.
What it generally does not do is actually trigger urination.
Because even while the prostate is being stimulated, sexual arousal continues suppressing the normal voiding reflex.
Your body is still committed to reproduction.
Not urination.
Which means that, contrary to approximately eighty-seven percent of the Watersports tag, a healthy man usually cannot simply decide to urinate halfway through enthusiastic penetrative sex because the mood seems right.
The nervous system, unfortunately for fanfiction authors, has opinions.
The penis, despite popular belief, does not exist independently from the rest of the nervous system.
The brain is, regrettably, still in charge.
So.
Those eleven thousand words you will read in the chapter of myonecrosis about psychogenic erectile dysfunction?
None of them were there by accident.
I spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time trying to explain, through the story rather than exposition, how psychogenic erectile dysfunction actually presents, why my character is still able to orgasm and ejaculate, why his body behaves the way it does, and quietly planting the groundwork for both the diagnosis and the treatment he'll eventually receive.
Could I have simply ignored all of that and written the kind of smut everyone already expects?
Absolutely.
It would also have been wrong.
And if you've been following me for any length of time, you'll know that I possess many flaws as a writer, but "willingly ignoring physiology after voluntarily researching it" unfortunately isn't one of them.
Which brings us to the piss.
The urination saga officially begins in this chapter, and will continue over the next few ones.
There will, indeed, be piss.
But there will also be urology. And anatomy. And fluid dynamics. And a deeply unfortunate amount of autonomic nervous system physiology.
Because after spending weeks reading papers, interrogating Reddit, and paying an actual urologist to answer increasingly deranged hypothetical questions, I could no longer, in good conscience, pretend that AO3's Watersports tag reflects how healthy urinary systems generally behave.
I have been burdened with knowledge.
Now you have too.
Anyway.
I wrote a hospital AU.
Somewhere along the way, that turned into four months of reading medical papers, watching nine hours of surgery videos, learning how to suture from YouTube, terrorising the good people of r/erectiledysfunction, and finally paying real money to sit opposite an exceptionally patient urologist and ask him questions about erections, urination, prostate stimulation, and whether fluid dynamics can, under sufficiently niche circumstances, be persuaded to cooperate.
I regret absolutely nothing.
References
Campbell-Walsh-Wein Urology
Guyton & Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology
Chapters:
Micturition (urination)
Male sexual functions
Moore's Clinically Oriented Anatomy
Excellent anatomical explanation of:
bladder neck
urethra
internal urethral sphincter
penis
Merck Manual Professional Edition
"Overview of Urinary Tract Function"
"Male Sexual Function"
Cleveland Clinic
Articles on:
Erections
Ejaculation
Erectile Dysfunction
Finally, a special shout-out to Pablo, my urologist. He'll never read this, but he was an absolute legend for patiently answering all of my questions. And to the good people of r/erectiledysfunction, who did absolutely nothing to deserve what I unleashed upon that subreddit.
Imagine the kind of research I'll do for the Omegaverse AU 👀
Maths/physics in 𝑷𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒄𝒂𝒓é 𝒓𝒆𝒄𝒖𝒓𝒓𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒐𝒓𝒆𝒎 fanfiction.
I lost the draft of this post after spending an entire day writing it (save your drafts, kids), so here's Take Two: a breakdown of some of the real mathematics and physics behind the nonsense I make Gojo and Geto flirt about.
A surprising amount of the science in the fic is real. The papers are mostly fictional. The mathematics they're built on is not.
Gojo Satoru's research
Gojo is a theoretical physicist working in quantum field theory, with most of his research revolving around non-perturbative physics.
His PhD dissertation is titled:
Quantum Field Singularities and the Mathematical Structure of Infinity in Strongly Coupled Systems.
No, "Structure of Infinity" is not an actual field. Yes, everything surrounding it is.
The title pulls from several real areas of modern theoretical physics:
Quantum Field Theory (QFT)
Strongly coupled systems
Renormalisation (the mathematics of handling infinities that appear in quantum field calculations)
Algebraic Quantum Field Theory
Functional analysis and infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces
Non-perturbative methods
The fictional leap is treating "the structure of infinity" as a research program rather than simply something to regularise away. In my universe, Gojo argues that infinities are not merely computational artifacts but encode genuine mathematical structure.
That idea is inspired by real work in renormalisation, non-perturbative QFT, and algebraic approaches to quantum fields.
Satoru really fw with non-perturbative physics and infinity, this was chosen to reflect his canon cursed technique, but in the real world if someone genuinely advances non-perturbative QFT structure, that is Nobel-tier/career-defining work; if they can systematically describe divergences instead of just renormalising them, that’s “field-changing” level. And Satoru is out here, doing it for funsies.
In chapter 3, when Satoru finally meets Geto, Geto mentions three of Satoru's papers:
1. Singularities and Vacuum Structure in Non-Perturbative Quantum Gravity Models
This combines several real research areas:
quantum gravity
vacuum structure
false vacua
vacuum condensates
singularity resolution
instantons
lattice methods
non-perturbative formulations of gravity
2. Infrared Behaviour of Gauge Fields.
This one is almost entirely real. And funny enough, Geto complained that it had 'too much physics'.
Infrared behaviour studies what happens at extremely low energies or very large distance scales in gauge theories like Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). It relates to confinement, gauge propagators, infrared fixed points, ghost fields, and the mathematics behind why quarks never appear in isolation.
Satoru is actually insane for this one, because all his previous papers have been like: lol what if infinity itself has topology? 😝
And this one is like: Here's 67 pages calculating propagators.
That's why Geto's brain was hurting.
3. C. Floyd's Coupling
This one is completely fake. There is no physicist named Cecil Floyd. There is no Floyd Coupling. I simply wanted Gojo to have an academic beef with an eighty-nine-year-old man.
The lore (which never appears in the fic) is that nine-year-old Gojo found one of Floyd's unpublished manuscripts in his grandfather's office. His grandfather, A. Gojo, was a physicist at Princeton.
Tiny genius Satoru read the mathematics, decided some of the calculus was wrong, scribbled his own corrections in the margins, and asked his grandfather to send them to Dr. Floyd.
Grandfather never did.
Months later Floyd published a paper whose calculations looked exactly like the ones Satoru had written.
Whether Floyd actually stole anything is deliberately left unresolved.
Gojo has nevertheless spent the next sixteen years completely convinced that an eighty-year-old theoretical physicist plagiarised him when he was nine.
This is, unfortunately, an entirely believable Gojo grudge.
In chapters five and six, Gojo and Geto discuss a paper titled: Space-time resonances in the spatiotemporal spectrum of nonlinear dispersive waves. This is a real paper that is actually linked in the fic (chapter five).
Also in chapter six, they disscuss Volkova's paper:
On the Limits of Anonymity: Information-Theoretic Bounds on Identity Recovery.
The paper itself is fictional. The mathematics absolutely isn't. It's inspired by several real research areas:
Bayesian inference
Information theory
Shannon entropy
Graph theory
Re-identification research
Privacy and differential privacy
Network science
The central idea is that every observation reduces uncertainty about identity.
Volkova effectively argues that, given enough heterogeneous information streams, anonymity collapses.
Geto is acknowledged because he built the simulation architecture used to test the theory at scale (this will circle back in future chapters).
His fictional technical report,
Hierarchical Representations for Heterogeneous Stream Fusion
is probably the most believable fake title I've ever invented.
It's essentially a systems paper on fusing GPS, financial records, communication logs, social graphs, and other heterogeneous data streams into hierarchical representations that allow large-scale identity inference.
Gojo's objection isn't that Volkova's mathematics is wrong.
He argues that anonymity isn't binary. It's metastable. His comparison is to vacuum stability in quantum field theory. Just because a system eventually transitions into a lower-energy state doesn't mean it wasn't stable on meaningful timescales. Likewise, anonymity can persist even if it is not fundamentally permanent.
During chapter seven, Geto admits he was a senior researcher in quantum simulation at RIKEN.
He says
"I was a senior researcher in quantum simulation. My work focused on large-scale simulations of complex physical systems."
he means computational models of systems that cannot be solved analytically.
Think:
lattice gauge theory
quantum many-body systems
condensed matter
plasma physics
quantum materials
large coupled dynamical systems.
This was included there to convey that Geto is not bluffing when he asks Satoru what machines he needs to prove his theories, Geto can really do it, because he's done that kind of work before.
Then we get to more recent chapters and the paper they are working together: Coupled Nonlinear Systems, Multistability, and Hidden Attractors
These are all real topics.
Coupled nonlinear systems study interacting nonlinear differential equations.
Multistability describes systems with multiple stable states whose final behaviour depends on initial conditions.
Hidden attractors are chaotic attractors that cannot be found simply by examining neighbourhoods around equilibrium points.
They're fascinating because they explain why some systems suddenly become unstable despite appearing perfectly well behaved.
It's also an absurdly good metaphor for Gojo and Geto.
And in the last published chapter they talk about the Millennium Prize Problems
Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture
Hodge conjecture
Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness
P versus NP problem
Poincaré conjecture (👀)
Riemann hypothesis
Yang–Mills existence and mass gap
All real physics. These will become particularly important for Geto's POV, same with some other mathematical ideas, paradoxes and concepts.
Now, on the topic of why some of their conversations sound real, some sound like absolute nonsense, and others sound suspiciously like flirting:
One of the biggest challenges when I came up with this fic was figuring out how to make two absurdly intelligent characters talk about maths and physics without losing everyone who doesn't have a degree in either.
The answer I landed on (not necessarily the best answer, just the one that made the most sense to me) was to be very selective about what the reader actually hears.
Gojo and Geto are geniuses. They wouldn't stop every five minutes to explain concepts to us mere mortals. They wouldn't have conversations like:
"What is that spurious correlation you've got there? Btw, a spurious correlation is a statistical relationship between two variables that appears meaningful but isn't actually caused by..." (chapter thirteen)
They just... wouldn't. There's no reason they would.
So instead, I have them talk the way I imagine two people at that level actually would: they skip all the explanations because they already share the language.
My job, then, is to choose which fragments of those conversations the reader gets to see.
Most of the topics they discuss are rooted in real mathematics or physics. What I do is pick the parts that are the most evocative, the ones that can pull double duty. Sometimes they're genuinely beautiful ideas. Sometimes they sound romantic entirely by accident. Sometimes they sound like they're flirting because... well, they are.
I basically steal the coolest-sounding bits from real science.
That first becomes obvious in Chapter Eight (the Midsommar chapter), where they talk about veins and later when they're very definitely talking about love, hypothetically.
By Chapter Fourteen, Satoru is practically confessing that he's in love with Geto, except he's doing it through a discussion about coupled nonlinear systems, multistability, and hidden attractors.
As one does.
Anyway, if there's one thing I'd like people to take away from all of this, it's that I never wanted the mathematics and physics to be there just to make the characters sound smart.
I wanted them to become another language.
For Gojo and Geto, equations are conversation. Research papers are love letters. Academic arguments are flirting. The way they challenge each other's assumptions, dismantle each other's proofs, or spend an entire evening debating a theorem is simply the way they know how to be intimate.
I also think the maths/physics flirting lands a little harder when you remember who these two are.
They're the smartest™.
They probably spend most of their lives being too far ahead of everyone else. They can't have these conversations with colleagues because people can't keep up. They can't talk this way with friends because the shared language isn't there. They have ideas that are too niche, too abstract, too technical to be understood by almost anyone around them.
And then they find each other.
Suddenly there's another person who not only understands every equation, every obscure paper, every ridiculous hypothetical, but pushes back. Challenges them. Makes them think harder. Keeps up.
How beautiful is that?
At the end of the day, this fic has always been about two lonely geniuses who finally found someone they could speak to in their own language. It just so happens that, for them, that language is mathematics.
And, finally, a little thank you to arXiv.
An embarrassing amount of my browser history for this fic is just me falling down arXiv rabbit holes at three in the morning, opening papers whose abstracts I only half understood, reading until my brain started buffering, and then opening three more because one sentence mentioned another paper that sounded interesting.
I am not a physicist or a mathematician. I have absolutely no business reading half the things I read. But one of the nicest parts of writing this fic has been discovering how generous academia can be with knowledge. So many researchers choose to make their work freely available, and without that, this story simply wouldn't exist in the way it does.
So, to everyone who uploads their papers to arXiv (as if they would ever read this): thank you for unknowingly helping me write an extremely niche romance between two people who flirt through quantum field theory.
And to you dearest reader: thank you for bearing with me and the nerds™. Consider donating to arXiv and Wikipedia because I live there, I have tabs I have not closed in three years.
Love you lot, mathematically.🩵
References:
These are all genuine, well-regarded texts, the kind of texts I'd expect Satoru and Geto to have in their shelves.
Quantum Field Theory
Steven Weinberg — The Quantum Theory of Fields, Vol. I: Foundations
Steven Weinberg — The Quantum Theory of Fields, Vol. II: Modern Applications
Steven Weinberg — The Quantum Theory of Fields, Vol. III: Supersymmetry
Michael E. Peskin & Daniel V. Schroeder — An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
Mark Srednicki — Quantum Field Theory
A. Zee — Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell
Rudolf Haag — Local Quantum Physics: Fields, Particles, Algebras
Mathematical Physics
Michael Reed & Barry Simon — Methods of Modern Mathematical Physics (Vols. I–IV)
Mikio Nakahara — Geometry, Topology and Physics
John C. Baez & Javier P. Muniain — Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity
Gregory L. Naber — Topology, Geometry and Gauge Fields: Foundations
Theodore Frankel — The Geometry of Physics: An Introduction
Gauge Theory & Quantum Chromodynamics
Chris Quigg — Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions
Walter Greiner, Stefan Schramm & Eckart Stein — Quantum Chromodynamics
Ta-Pei Cheng & Ling-Fong Li — Gauge Theory of Elementary Particle Physics
John F. Donoghue, Eugene Golowich & Barry R. Holstein — Dynamics of the Standard Model
Renormalisation & Strongly Coupled Systems
John Cardy — Scaling and Renormalization in Statistical Physics
Subir Sachdev — Quantum Phase Transitions
Steven M. Girvin & Kun Yang — Modern Condensed Matter Physics
Nigel Goldenfeld — Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group
Quantum Gravity
Carlo Rovelli — Quantum Gravity
Lee Smolin — Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Thomas Thiemann — Modern Canonical Quantum General Relativity
Rodolfo Gambini & Jorge Pullin — A First Course in Loop Quantum Gravity
Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne & John Archibald Wheeler — Gravitation
General Relativity
Robert M. Wald — General Relativity
Sean Carroll — Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity
Bernard Schutz — A First Course in General Relativity
Nonlinear Dynamics & Chaos
Steven H. Strogatz — Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
Kathleen T. Alligood, Tim D. Sauer & James A. Yorke — Chaos: An Introduction to Dynamical Systems
John Guckenheimer & Philip Holmes — Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems, and Bifurcations of Vector Fields
J. M. T. Thompson & H. B. Stewart — Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos
Information Theory
Thomas M. Cover & Joy A. Thomas — Elements of Information Theory
David J. C. MacKay — Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms
Claude E. Shannon & Warren Weaver — The Mathematical Theory of Communication
Probability & Statistics
Edwin T. Jaynes — Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani & Jerome Friedman — The Elements of Statistical Learning
Christopher M. Bishop — Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning
Kevin P. Murphy — Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective
Network Science
Mark Newman — Networks
Albert-László Barabási — Network Science
Duncan J. Watts — Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
Quantum Computing & Quantum Simulation
Michael A. Nielsen & Isaac L. Chuang — Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
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