Feynman diagrams.

In particle physics, quantum electrodynamics (QED) is the relativistic quantum field theory of electrodynamics. In essence, it describes how light and matter interact and is the first theory where full agreement between quantum mechanics and special relativity is achieved.

Quotes

• When after some weeks I had a chance to talk to Oppenheimer, I was astonished to discover that his reasons for being uninterested in my work were quite the opposite of what I had imagined. I had expected that he would disparage my program as merely unoriginal, a minor adumbration of Schwinger and Feynman. On the contrary, On the contrary, he considered it to be fundamentally on the wrong track. He thought adumbrating Schwinger and Feynman to be a wasted effort, because he did not believe that the ideas of Schwinger and Feynman had much to do with reality. I had known that he had never appreciated Feynman, but it came as a shock to hear him now violently opposing Schwinger, his own student, whose work he had acclaimed so enthusiastically six months earlier. He had somehow become convinced during his stay in Europe that physics was in need of radically new ideas, that this quantum electrodynamics of Schwinger and Feynman was just another misguided attempt to patch up old ideas with fancy mathematics.
  • Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (1979), p. 73

• The theory of quantum electrodynamics describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is—absurd.
  • Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

• We physicists are always checking to see if there is something the matter with the theory. That’s the game, because if there is something the matter, it’s interesting! But so far, we have found nothing wrong with the theory of quantum electrodynamics. It is, therefore, I would say, the jewel of physics—our proudest possession.
  The theory of quantum electrodynamics is also the prototype for new theories that attempt to explain nuclear phenomena, the things that go on inside the nuclei of atoms. If one were to think of the physical world as a stage, then the actors would be not only electrons, which are outside the nucleus in atoms, but also quarks and gluons and so forth—dozens of kinds of particles—inside the nucleus. And though these “actors” appear quite different from one another, they all act in a certain style—a strange and peculiar style—the “quantum” style. At the end, I’ll tell you a little bit about the nuclear particles. In the meantime, I’m only going to tell you about photons—particles of light—and electrons, to keep it simple. Because it’s the way they act that is important, and the way they act is very interesting.
  • Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985), Ch. 1. Introduction

• The history of QED in the period from 1946 to 1949 has many similarities with the history of the developments of quantum mechanics from 1925 to 1927, when Schrödinger and Heisenberg had propounded two different approaches to quantum mechanics. The correspondence can be taken to be: Feynman is to Heisenberg what Tomonaga-Schwinger is to Schrödinger, with Dyson initially playing the role of Pauli, Schrödinger, and Eckart in proving the equivalence of the two approaches.
  • Silvan S. Schweber (1994). QED and the Men who Made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga. Princeton University Press. p. 12. ISBN 0-691-03327-7. 

See also

• Quantum mechanics

External links