Rick,
I believe I was talking to rgrunt about what he was posting with regard to particle physics. I listed some textbooks which I felt that he might be interested in looking at. I mentioned Dirac braket notion in the sense that I did not believe that Griffith used that in his quantum book, and that for a good introduction/use of it to look at Sakuari's book. I did not say anything about Hermitian operators.
But as far as particle physics and space- time go, it is not too difficult to do the derivation of Einstein's General Relativity equation from starting with a spin 2 massless particle.
