'The Theory of Positrons' & 'Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics,' pp. 749-759 & 769-789 in Physical Review, Second Series, Vol. 76, No. 6, 15 September 1949. [With:] 'Mathematical Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Electromagnetic Interaction,' pp. 440-457 in ibid., Vol. 80, No. 3, 1 November 1950

FEYNMAN, Richard P.

Published by American Physical Society, Lancaster, PA; New York, 1950

The Papers that Introduced the Feynman Diagram. First edition, rare, journal issues in the original printed wrappers, of Feynman's two 1949 papers on quantum electrodynamics-in which the diagrams that now bear his name make their first published appearance and the 'Feynman rules' for their mathematical interpretation are laid down-together with his third paper of November 1950, in which those same rules are rigorously derived from first principles. For the body of work contained in these three papers Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, 'for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences' for elementary-particle physics. Modern high-energy theory has never since been conducted in any other graphical language; every diagram scribbled on a blackboard or napkin at CERN, Fermilab, or KEK in the last three-quarters of a century descends in a straight line from the handful of woodcut-simple drawings in the three papers here offered. Quantum electrodynamics is the quantum theory of the interaction of electrically charged particles with the electromagnetic field-the theory of how electrons, positrons, and photons behave. It has been called 'the jewel of physics' for the extreme accuracy of its predictions: the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron calculated from QED agrees with the measured value to roughly a few parts in 10 , the most stringent agreement between theory and experiment anywhere in physical science. The theory was born with Dirac's 1927 paper on the emission and absorption of radiation and was developed through the 1930s by Heisenberg, Jordan, Pauli, and others; but throughout that decade and well into the next it remained conceptually unsettled and calculationally paralysed. At every order of perturbation theory beyond the lowest, QED returned infinite self-energies for the electron and a zoo of other divergences, and no systematic procedure existed for extracting finite, physically meaningful answers from the formalism. The experimental trigger for the postwar breakthrough came at the Shelter Island conference of June 1947, when Willis Lamb reported the small but unambiguous shift of the 2S½ level of hydrogen relative to the 2P½ level that now bears his name. Hans Bethe, travelling back to Cornell on the train the following day, produced a non-relativistic calculation that reproduced the magnitude of the Lamb shift by a physically reasonable subtraction of the divergent integrals-the first step toward what would become the renormalisation programme. The full solution emerged independently, and in three strikingly different mathematical languages, in the laboratories of Tomonaga in Tokyo, Schwinger at Harvard, and Feynman at Cornell in the years 1947-1949. Tomonaga, working in near-total isolation from Western physics, had constructed a manifestly covariant formulation of QED as early as 1943. Schwinger, between 1947 and 1948, developed a highly formal operator-calculus approach and showed how renormalisation could remove the divergences order by order. Feynman, over the same period and in almost complete ignorance of Schwinger's scheme, took a third route-less formal, visually mediated, and grounded in his own path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, which had been the subject of his 1942 Princeton doctoral thesis under John Archibald Wheeler. At the Pocono Manor Inn conference of spring 1948-a closed meeting of the inner circle of American theoretical physics, chaired by Oppenheimer-Schwinger delivered a day-long lecture that held the audience rapt; Feynman followed late in the afternoon, presented his diagrams, was interrupted by Bohr, Dirac, and Teller, and left depressed. Pocono had not understood him. The three papers here offered are the full, publicly intelligible statement of the method that Pocono had missed. The first, 'The Theory of Positrons,' submitted on 8 April 1949, treats the motion of electrons an. Seller Inventory # 6685

Bibliographic Details

Title: 'The Theory of Positrons' & 'Space-Time ...
Publisher: American Physical Society, Lancaster, PA; New York
Publication Date: 1950
Edition: First edition.