QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
by Richard Feynman
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Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the physical world, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the general public. Here Feynman provides a classic and definitive introduction to QED (namely, quantum electrodynamics), that part of quantum field theory describing the interactions of light with charged particles. Using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned "Feynman diagrams" show more instead of advanced mathematics, Feynman clearly and humorously communicates both the substance and spirit of QED to the layperson. A. Zee's introduction places Feynman's book and his seminal contribution to QED in historical context and further highlights Feynman's uniquely appealing and illuminating style. show lessTags
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This weekend just passed my flatmate's boyfriend was visiting. Being the inquisitive sort, at one point he asked me if I could explain the main results of my PhD thesis to him in terms he would understand. To my eternal shame my knee-jerk response was "No." But a few moments later I was to be found scrawling on a napkin, explaining rational points on curves, density arguments, counting functions, and concluding by using the word "generalise" far more times in one sentence than I was comfortable with.
He seemed to follow my haphazard ramblings which is always enough to leave one chuffed. It's no secret to the science community that its biggest failing is an inability to communicate with and engage the public. The more esoteric the show more science, the trickier it is to convey it in terms that are both accurate and interesting. And, outside of pure mathematics, it doesn't get a great deal more esoteric than quantum mecahnics. So Richard Feynman's QED is laudable for, if nothing else, being about as understandable as is possible with this subject. There were times that the text lost me, but after giving it some thought I realised in each case that it was because I was expecting the quantum world to make sense, and to paraphrase my old Physics teacher: if quantum mechanics starts making sense, then you've stopped understanding it.
Feynman's abilities as a scientific orator are pretty well known—one of my favourite videos on Youtube is a two-and-a-half minute video of Feynman sitting in a chair explaining how a train stays on the tracks. Seriously. Feynman's writing skills are apparently just as good, but I've not read any of his other books and this one is actually the edited transcriptions of four of his lectures, so his speaking prowess proves more useful here. And as if being fascinating, self-deprecating, and witty wasn't enough, he also manages to be quite touching. The lectures were the inaugural set in a series dedicated to Alix Mautner, an English major and long time friend of Feynman to whom the physicist had promised to explain quantum electrodynamics in terms she could understand. Sadly she died before he managed to do so, but the lectures here are, as he says, the ones he prepared for Alex, but that he could no longer give just to her. show less
He seemed to follow my haphazard ramblings which is always enough to leave one chuffed. It's no secret to the science community that its biggest failing is an inability to communicate with and engage the public. The more esoteric the show more science, the trickier it is to convey it in terms that are both accurate and interesting. And, outside of pure mathematics, it doesn't get a great deal more esoteric than quantum mecahnics. So Richard Feynman's QED is laudable for, if nothing else, being about as understandable as is possible with this subject. There were times that the text lost me, but after giving it some thought I realised in each case that it was because I was expecting the quantum world to make sense, and to paraphrase my old Physics teacher: if quantum mechanics starts making sense, then you've stopped understanding it.
Feynman's abilities as a scientific orator are pretty well known—one of my favourite videos on Youtube is a two-and-a-half minute video of Feynman sitting in a chair explaining how a train stays on the tracks. Seriously. Feynman's writing skills are apparently just as good, but I've not read any of his other books and this one is actually the edited transcriptions of four of his lectures, so his speaking prowess proves more useful here. And as if being fascinating, self-deprecating, and witty wasn't enough, he also manages to be quite touching. The lectures were the inaugural set in a series dedicated to Alix Mautner, an English major and long time friend of Feynman to whom the physicist had promised to explain quantum electrodynamics in terms she could understand. Sadly she died before he managed to do so, but the lectures here are, as he says, the ones he prepared for Alex, but that he could no longer give just to her. show less
Just the facts, Ma'am, August 6, 2006
In the Introduction to the 'Strange Theory of Light and Matter' Feynman tells us that what he likes to talk about is the "part of physics that is known, rather than a part that is unknown." And he goes on to give us a thumbnail sketch, a "physicist's history of physics," which shows how physicist's, in their quest to describe the world, continually reduce a group of seemingly unrelated phenomenon to a single phenomenon. So heat and sound were found, thanks to Newton, to be reducible to laws of motion, while electricity, magnetism and light were reducible to Maxwell's electromagnetic wave. In this way physicist's explain the world.
Here one is almost tempted to say that they proceed much as religion show more and ideology do. Religion has from the beginning of recorded history been taking phenomenon and feelings, like storms and suffering or aging and despair, and molding them into an internally coherent explanation of all that is and was and will be. They do this by separating the relevant from the incidental, then uncovering the essential by excluding the accidental. They simplify. In similar ways ideologues like the communists take what at one time were discreet incidents and disparate facts (for instance, the poverty of the third world and imperialism) and weave them into a grand general explanation. Is science merely the latest avatar of religion? - Or perhaps it is an ideology without tears?
Not so fast! Feynman goes on to show us that attempts to explain the atomic world foundered on the laws of motion. He shows us that the rescue of those shipwrecked on the shoals of classical theory involved the invention of a new, counter-intuitive theory, Quantum Mechanics. He then goes on, while discussing a small portion of that theory, to give us the (deliberately) hilarious and 'absurd' example of how physicists predict how many photons, out of a given number, will be reflected back from a surface. 'Draw little arrows on a piece of paper' and watch the clock, he tells us. And with no explanation as to why this procedure works! Of course, for physics, what matters is that it does work. Physicists have been forced "away from making absolute predictions to merely calculating the probability of an event." But where is the essential, the eternal, the necessary?
Perhaps this is what Feynman is driving at. Science describes, it doesn't explain why. We should all wonder at that. The great 'philosophical' questions that drive theology and political ideology are beyond the purview of physics. Science doesn't create worlds; nor does it 'interpret' or change them, it simply describes what it finds. (It is technology that changes the world.) Freud saw fit to end one of his books by saying that 'our science is no illusion, but it would be an illusion to believe you can find elsewhere what it does not offer.' But how much truer this is of physics! One is then perhaps not surprised to come away from this little book wondering exactly what the status of philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics and religion would be in a genuinely scientific world.
But of course there will never be, given human irrationality, an entirely scientific human culture. This book is a superb introduction to quantum electrodynamics. It's 'experimentalism' and agnosticism towards grand philosophical explanations I found very congenial and convincing. Feynman is an engaging personality and this is an entertaining book. While one doesn't need a degree in physics and math to understand him a lay competence and interest in math and physics is certainly necessary. For those of us still living in a Newtonian world, a dwindling number to be sure, this book will have several surprising moments. But that really is part of the show! show less
In the Introduction to the 'Strange Theory of Light and Matter' Feynman tells us that what he likes to talk about is the "part of physics that is known, rather than a part that is unknown." And he goes on to give us a thumbnail sketch, a "physicist's history of physics," which shows how physicist's, in their quest to describe the world, continually reduce a group of seemingly unrelated phenomenon to a single phenomenon. So heat and sound were found, thanks to Newton, to be reducible to laws of motion, while electricity, magnetism and light were reducible to Maxwell's electromagnetic wave. In this way physicist's explain the world.
Here one is almost tempted to say that they proceed much as religion show more and ideology do. Religion has from the beginning of recorded history been taking phenomenon and feelings, like storms and suffering or aging and despair, and molding them into an internally coherent explanation of all that is and was and will be. They do this by separating the relevant from the incidental, then uncovering the essential by excluding the accidental. They simplify. In similar ways ideologues like the communists take what at one time were discreet incidents and disparate facts (for instance, the poverty of the third world and imperialism) and weave them into a grand general explanation. Is science merely the latest avatar of religion? - Or perhaps it is an ideology without tears?
Not so fast! Feynman goes on to show us that attempts to explain the atomic world foundered on the laws of motion. He shows us that the rescue of those shipwrecked on the shoals of classical theory involved the invention of a new, counter-intuitive theory, Quantum Mechanics. He then goes on, while discussing a small portion of that theory, to give us the (deliberately) hilarious and 'absurd' example of how physicists predict how many photons, out of a given number, will be reflected back from a surface. 'Draw little arrows on a piece of paper' and watch the clock, he tells us. And with no explanation as to why this procedure works! Of course, for physics, what matters is that it does work. Physicists have been forced "away from making absolute predictions to merely calculating the probability of an event." But where is the essential, the eternal, the necessary?
Perhaps this is what Feynman is driving at. Science describes, it doesn't explain why. We should all wonder at that. The great 'philosophical' questions that drive theology and political ideology are beyond the purview of physics. Science doesn't create worlds; nor does it 'interpret' or change them, it simply describes what it finds. (It is technology that changes the world.) Freud saw fit to end one of his books by saying that 'our science is no illusion, but it would be an illusion to believe you can find elsewhere what it does not offer.' But how much truer this is of physics! One is then perhaps not surprised to come away from this little book wondering exactly what the status of philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics and religion would be in a genuinely scientific world.
But of course there will never be, given human irrationality, an entirely scientific human culture. This book is a superb introduction to quantum electrodynamics. It's 'experimentalism' and agnosticism towards grand philosophical explanations I found very congenial and convincing. Feynman is an engaging personality and this is an entertaining book. While one doesn't need a degree in physics and math to understand him a lay competence and interest in math and physics is certainly necessary. For those of us still living in a Newtonian world, a dwindling number to be sure, this book will have several surprising moments. But that really is part of the show! show less
... since there are obviously more people here tonight than there were before, some of you haven't heard the other two lectures and will find this lecture almost incomprehensible. Those of you who have heard the other two lectures will also find this lecture incomprehensible, but you know that's all right: as I explained in the first lecture, the way we have to explain Nature is generally incomprehensible to us.
This is a transcript of a set of four lectures Feynman gave to a "non-technical" audience in 1983, with the goal of giving them an intelligible account of quantum electrodynamics, one of the most conceptually-difficult bits of physics, an area that is normally reserved for graduate students, and the field in which he had earned show more his Nobel prize.
It's the kind of challenge that Feynman obviously loved, and he rose to it with enthusiasm, taking care to make sure the audience realised that what physicists are trying to do is not so much to arrive at a philosophical "understanding" of the how or why of the physical universe, as to attempt to find mathematical tools that give them a reasonably good chance of predicting the numbers that will come out of an experiment. By the time we get down to the scale on which quantum physics operates, we don't have the mental equipment to make any kind of imaginative sense of the phenomena that are being described, and those mathematical tools are all we have. But that's perfectly OK, as long as they work we can use them, we don't need to waste time trying to visualise what they represent. And when they don't work, it starts to get interesting and we can do more physics...
Feynman takes us through the interactions of photons and electrons in an astonishingly painless way in the first three lectures, then in the fourth he sketches in the missing part, what happens in the nucleus.
Another of the really great science writers. A pleasure to read, even if it doesn't really put you into a position to calculate the magnetic moment of the electron... show less
This is a transcript of a set of four lectures Feynman gave to a "non-technical" audience in 1983, with the goal of giving them an intelligible account of quantum electrodynamics, one of the most conceptually-difficult bits of physics, an area that is normally reserved for graduate students, and the field in which he had earned show more his Nobel prize.
It's the kind of challenge that Feynman obviously loved, and he rose to it with enthusiasm, taking care to make sure the audience realised that what physicists are trying to do is not so much to arrive at a philosophical "understanding" of the how or why of the physical universe, as to attempt to find mathematical tools that give them a reasonably good chance of predicting the numbers that will come out of an experiment. By the time we get down to the scale on which quantum physics operates, we don't have the mental equipment to make any kind of imaginative sense of the phenomena that are being described, and those mathematical tools are all we have. But that's perfectly OK, as long as they work we can use them, we don't need to waste time trying to visualise what they represent. And when they don't work, it starts to get interesting and we can do more physics...
Feynman takes us through the interactions of photons and electrons in an astonishingly painless way in the first three lectures, then in the fourth he sketches in the missing part, what happens in the nucleus.
Another of the really great science writers. A pleasure to read, even if it doesn't really put you into a position to calculate the magnetic moment of the electron... show less
“Quantum Physics, Simplified. A Masterclass from Feynman” by Rebecca Raffle
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
There are few science books that manage to be both profoundly educational and wildly entertaining. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is one of them. Richard Feynman, with his characteristic wit and clarity, takes one of the most mind-bending concepts in physics, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), and makes it accessible to non-physicists. This book is a perfect example of why Feynman remains one of the most beloved science communicators of all time.
A Deeply Counterintuitive Yet Fascinating Theory
QED is the foundation of modern physics, explaining how light and matter interact at the quantum level. It’s also notoriously show more difficult to grasp, filled with bizarre phenomena that defy classical intuition.
And yet, in just under 200 pages, Feynman somehow makes sense of it all. He strips away the intimidating equations and instead explains QED using simple diagrams and everyday analogies, making even complex ideas feel surprisingly intuitive.
One of my favorite concepts he breaks down is:
“Photons, electrons, and other particles don’t move in straight lines. They take every possible path and interfere with themselves.”
That one sentence changes the way you see reality. If you ever thought quantum physics was too complicated to understand, Feynman proves that you just need the right teacher.
Why This Book Stands Out 🔥
✔️ Feynman’s Teaching Style is Brilliant – He talks to you, not at you, making you feel like you’re sitting in one of his legendary Caltech lectures.
✔️ No Math, No Problem – Unlike most physics books, this one doesn’t require equations to explain deep quantum principles.
✔️ It Changes the Way You See the World – This book isn’t just about photons and electrons—it’s about how nature actually works on a fundamental level.
Who Should Read This?
✅ Anyone Curious About Quantum Physics – Even if you’ve struggled with physics before, this book makes it approachable and engaging.
✅ STEM Enthusiasts – If you love books by Carl Sagan or Brian Greene, this is a must-read.
✅ Students & Educators – This book should be required reading for anyone interested in science communication.
Things to Keep in Mind 🧐
🔸 Some Parts Are Still Complex – Even without math, QED is inherently strange, and a few sections require re-reading to fully absorb.
🔸 Short, But Dense – At just 190 pages, this book is packed with information. Take your time with it, it’s worth it.
Final Thoughts: One of the Best Science Books Ever Written 🔥
I’m giving QED 5 stars because it’s a rare gem in the world of science writing. Feynman’s ability to make one of the most counterintuitive theories in physics feel almost simple is nothing short of genius. Whether you’re a physics enthusiast, a curious reader, or just someone who loves learning new things, this book deserves a place on your shelf.
🚀 If you’ve ever wanted to understand quantum physics but didn’t know where to start, THIS is the book for you.
📚 Enjoy my reviews? Let’s connect!
📖 Read more in-depth reviews & essays on Medium: medium.com/@RebeccaRaffle
📷 Follow my Instagram @RebeccaRaffle for book updates & foodie adventures: https://www.instagram.com/rebeccaraffle
🌍 Explore more on my website: https://www.rebeccaraffle.com show less
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
There are few science books that manage to be both profoundly educational and wildly entertaining. QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter is one of them. Richard Feynman, with his characteristic wit and clarity, takes one of the most mind-bending concepts in physics, Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), and makes it accessible to non-physicists. This book is a perfect example of why Feynman remains one of the most beloved science communicators of all time.
A Deeply Counterintuitive Yet Fascinating Theory
QED is the foundation of modern physics, explaining how light and matter interact at the quantum level. It’s also notoriously show more difficult to grasp, filled with bizarre phenomena that defy classical intuition.
And yet, in just under 200 pages, Feynman somehow makes sense of it all. He strips away the intimidating equations and instead explains QED using simple diagrams and everyday analogies, making even complex ideas feel surprisingly intuitive.
One of my favorite concepts he breaks down is:
“Photons, electrons, and other particles don’t move in straight lines. They take every possible path and interfere with themselves.”
That one sentence changes the way you see reality. If you ever thought quantum physics was too complicated to understand, Feynman proves that you just need the right teacher.
Why This Book Stands Out 🔥
✔️ Feynman’s Teaching Style is Brilliant – He talks to you, not at you, making you feel like you’re sitting in one of his legendary Caltech lectures.
✔️ No Math, No Problem – Unlike most physics books, this one doesn’t require equations to explain deep quantum principles.
✔️ It Changes the Way You See the World – This book isn’t just about photons and electrons—it’s about how nature actually works on a fundamental level.
Who Should Read This?
✅ Anyone Curious About Quantum Physics – Even if you’ve struggled with physics before, this book makes it approachable and engaging.
✅ STEM Enthusiasts – If you love books by Carl Sagan or Brian Greene, this is a must-read.
✅ Students & Educators – This book should be required reading for anyone interested in science communication.
Things to Keep in Mind 🧐
🔸 Some Parts Are Still Complex – Even without math, QED is inherently strange, and a few sections require re-reading to fully absorb.
🔸 Short, But Dense – At just 190 pages, this book is packed with information. Take your time with it, it’s worth it.
Final Thoughts: One of the Best Science Books Ever Written 🔥
I’m giving QED 5 stars because it’s a rare gem in the world of science writing. Feynman’s ability to make one of the most counterintuitive theories in physics feel almost simple is nothing short of genius. Whether you’re a physics enthusiast, a curious reader, or just someone who loves learning new things, this book deserves a place on your shelf.
🚀 If you’ve ever wanted to understand quantum physics but didn’t know where to start, THIS is the book for you.
📚 Enjoy my reviews? Let’s connect!
📖 Read more in-depth reviews & essays on Medium: medium.com/@RebeccaRaffle
📷 Follow my Instagram @RebeccaRaffle for book updates & foodie adventures: https://www.instagram.com/rebeccaraffle
🌍 Explore more on my website: https://www.rebeccaraffle.com show less
In typical Feynman fashion, this book skates on the edge of hard science and popular science, thereby presenting physicist-level experimentation and results to the widest possible audience. It is obvious that Feynman was passionate about QED (quantum electrodynamics; an unfortunate name, states Feynman). His goal is to do two things: (a) to present QED as "our best example of a good [scientific] theory" and (b) to describe the strange theory of "the interaction of light and electrons" (152, 4). Strange is an understated adjective to describe how photons and electrons interact, as is made clear through the example, chiefly, of the partial reflection problem. Over and over, Feynman sets us up for what common sense would tells us is going show more to happen, given a certain experiment, and then proves the contrary (or, the completed unexpected). At times, it can seem that these particles are aware of each other and...of us! Some of the major discoveries since Newton are: electrons looked like particles at first, and photons looked like waves at first; but now we find that both objects behave sometimes like waves and sometimes like particles. Further, it "appears that all the 'particles' in Nature--quarks, gluons, nutrinos, and so forth...behave in this quantum mechanical way" (85). The two facts that struck me most were that (a) all particles have an anti-particle; and (b) when the two collide, they annihilate each other and form other particles (98). So, if matter and anti-matter collide, annihilation occurs, and a photon is emitted. Yes, the quantum world is quite strange, and for that all the more intriguing. show less
This weekend just passed my flatmate's boyfriend was visiting. Being the inquisitive sort, at one point he asked me if I could explain the main results of my PhD thesis to him in terms he would understand. To my eternal shame my knee-jerk response was "No." But a few moments later I was to be found scrawling on a napkin, explaining rational points on curves, density arguments, counting functions, and concluding by using the word "generalise" far more times in one sentence than I was comfortable with.
He seemed to follow my haphazard ramblings which is always enough to leave one chuffed. It's no secret to the science community that its biggest failing is an inability to communicate with and engage the public. The more esoteric the show more science, the trickier it is to convey it in terms that are both accurate and interesting. And, outside of pure mathematics, it doesn't get a great deal more esoteric than quantum mecahnics. So Richard Feynman's QED is laudable for, if nothing else, being about as understandable as is possible with this subject. There were times that the text lost me, but after giving it some thought I realised in each case that it was because I was expecting the quantum world to make sense, and to paraphrase my old Physics teacher: if quantum mechanics starts making sense, then you've stopped understanding it.
Feynman's abilities as a scientific orator are pretty well known—one of my favourite videos on Youtube is a two-and-a-half minute video of Feynman sitting in a chair explaining how a train stays on the tracks. Seriously. Feynman's writing skills are apparently just as good, but I've not read any of his other books and this one is actually the edited transcriptions of four of his lectures, so his speaking prowess proves more useful here. And as if being fascinating, self-deprecating, and witty wasn't enough, he also manages to be quite touching. The lectures were the inaugural set in a series dedicated to Alix Mautner, an English major and long time friend of Feynman to whom the physicist had promised to explain quantum electrodynamics in terms she could understand. Sadly she died before he managed to do so, but the lectures here are, as he says, the ones he prepared for Alex, but that he could no longer give just to her. show less
He seemed to follow my haphazard ramblings which is always enough to leave one chuffed. It's no secret to the science community that its biggest failing is an inability to communicate with and engage the public. The more esoteric the show more science, the trickier it is to convey it in terms that are both accurate and interesting. And, outside of pure mathematics, it doesn't get a great deal more esoteric than quantum mecahnics. So Richard Feynman's QED is laudable for, if nothing else, being about as understandable as is possible with this subject. There were times that the text lost me, but after giving it some thought I realised in each case that it was because I was expecting the quantum world to make sense, and to paraphrase my old Physics teacher: if quantum mechanics starts making sense, then you've stopped understanding it.
Feynman's abilities as a scientific orator are pretty well known—one of my favourite videos on Youtube is a two-and-a-half minute video of Feynman sitting in a chair explaining how a train stays on the tracks. Seriously. Feynman's writing skills are apparently just as good, but I've not read any of his other books and this one is actually the edited transcriptions of four of his lectures, so his speaking prowess proves more useful here. And as if being fascinating, self-deprecating, and witty wasn't enough, he also manages to be quite touching. The lectures were the inaugural set in a series dedicated to Alix Mautner, an English major and long time friend of Feynman to whom the physicist had promised to explain quantum electrodynamics in terms she could understand. Sadly she died before he managed to do so, but the lectures here are, as he says, the ones he prepared for Alex, but that he could no longer give just to her. show less
Knowing absolutely nothing about quantum electrodynamics (the theory of photon interaction with matter), one can still make sense of the the book - and that is Feynman's true genius, in a way.
In a nutshell, QED is (at present) the nearest step to a Grand Unified Theory, the utopian theory which will explain the universe in the form of formulae that are so short that they can be inscribed on your shirt. It explains almost everything that we notice in our day-to-day lives - ranging from why you see your image in a mirror, to more esoteric effects such as predicting which particles arise during extremely high-energy collisions (such as in the Large Hadron Collider).
It is a marvel to witness a genius at work. Without any Math whatsoever, show more Feynman explains the theory while not leaving out any detail - where it works, where it doesn't work, and how our understanding of Physics is still pitiful, because every answer that we find brings a whole lot of questions to the fore.
The fourth chapter is on our understanding of Physics so far, and where QED fits in - it is a tonal mess, especially when compared to the succinct previous chapters, and it is the only time I felt disgruntled when reading the book.
TL;DR - an amazing read to reinvigorate interest in Physics/science, or to ignite the spark of interest that was never there in the first place. Either way, it is a must-read for the inquisitive mind. show less
In a nutshell, QED is (at present) the nearest step to a Grand Unified Theory, the utopian theory which will explain the universe in the form of formulae that are so short that they can be inscribed on your shirt. It explains almost everything that we notice in our day-to-day lives - ranging from why you see your image in a mirror, to more esoteric effects such as predicting which particles arise during extremely high-energy collisions (such as in the Large Hadron Collider).
It is a marvel to witness a genius at work. Without any Math whatsoever, show more Feynman explains the theory while not leaving out any detail - where it works, where it doesn't work, and how our understanding of Physics is still pitiful, because every answer that we find brings a whole lot of questions to the fore.
The fourth chapter is on our understanding of Physics so far, and where QED fits in - it is a tonal mess, especially when compared to the succinct previous chapters, and it is the only time I felt disgruntled when reading the book.
TL;DR - an amazing read to reinvigorate interest in Physics/science, or to ignite the spark of interest that was never there in the first place. Either way, it is a must-read for the inquisitive mind. show less
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- Original title
- QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
- Original publication date
- 1985; 1990 (1st British edition) (1st British edition)
- First words
- Alix Mautner was very curious about physics and often asked me to explain things to her. I would do all right, just as I do with a group of students at Caltech that come to me for an hour on Thursdays, but eventually I’... (show all)d fail at what is to me the most interesting part: We would always get hung up on the crazy ideas of quantum mechanics. I told her I couldn’t explain these ideas in an hour or an evening—it would take a long time—but I promised her that someday I’d prepare a set of lectures on the subject.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I’m sorry if all this speculation about new particles confused you, but I decided to complete my discussion of the rest of physics to show you how the character of those laws—the framework of amplitudes, the diagrams that represent the interactions to be calculated, an so on—appears to be the same as for the theory of quantum electrodynamics, our best example of a good theory.
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