Status
Checked out
Call number
Collection
Publication
Princeton University Press (1988), Edition: New Ed, 176 pages
Description
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" 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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member pomonomo2003
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
Here one is almost tempted to say that they proceed much as religion 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!
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
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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 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!
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LibraryThing member GaryPatella
If you want to be introduced to quantum physics, this is the book to get. Feynmann was absolutely brilliant when it came to explaining complicated phenomena in a simple way. I have read quite a number of books explaining quantum phenomena, but this one is, by far, the best.
LibraryThing member kencf0618
Quantum mechanics. Utterly mysterious and accurate to umpteenth decimal places. Why? Who knows?!? This is the best non-whack introduction to QM in general and QED in particular. Among its other virtues, it doesn't overinterpret.
LibraryThing member miketroll
A science classic. Short and sweet exposition of quantum electrodynamics. A must-read for anyone interested in how the world works.
LibraryThing member lunaverse
Feynman is the best author in the field of physics. In his easy-going, humorous style, he covers the sticky topic of Quantum ElectroDynamics.
LibraryThing member djaquay
This one sat on my shelf for years, (I almost forgot I bought it), but was quite an amazing geek read. I wish it had been twice as long, actually, as he glossed over a few things at the end that I'd like to know more about, but it was quite a good explanation of what (at least in 1988) we knew
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about QED. Show Less
LibraryThing member voodoochilli
A bit over my head! Cited as an accessible venture into QED (if such a thing can exist) I didn't find this book nearly as interesting as Feynman's biographies. Although science interests me greatly, maybe the subject is just a little too complicated for me to understand properly, and that is why I
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have only given this book three stars. Show Less
LibraryThing member wweisser
Utterly and completely brilliant.
LibraryThing member Hanuman2
Needs to be balanced by understanding of Bohmianism...makes it less strange philosophically. Still a great book, and great in its presentation of Copenhagen interpretation, even if that is the wrong one.
LibraryThing member Lyndatrue
I was amazed to see, in all those reviews of this book, that no one pointed out Feynman's play on words. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
For a more elegant, and lengthy work, I'd recommend Six Easy Pieces, or his beautiful three-volume set of the lectures on physics.
For a more elegant, and lengthy work, I'd recommend Six Easy Pieces, or his beautiful three-volume set of the lectures on physics.
LibraryThing member manishch
great book, but a bit disconcerting not to have any answer at all to "why", just a description of "how" at the very basic level.
LibraryThing member aquaorbis
You could call me a science groupie. I put on Cosmos while I clean the house, snatch up Michio Kaku's books like they won't be there tomorrow, know all the words to every Symphony of Science song ever, and follow Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter--but that doesn't mean I know the first thing about
Anyway. Richard Feynman is definitely in the top five on my list of favorite physicists. (Yep, I have a list. Expect nothing less from a girl who named her cat Sagan.) I love Feynman's sense of humor and his whimsical world-view. He may be gone, but he's not forgotten. So when I had a stupid question about light, I figured it was high time I read his book on the subject. My stupid question goes like this: Why is it that, when you turn off a light, the room immediately goes dark? Where does the light go? Why doesn't it bounce around the room for a bit before dispersing? If light is everywhere, why is the universe so dark?
Well, this book didn't really help me answer those questions. If Feynman taught me anything here, it's that light is the honey badger of particles: it does what it wants, and leaves tiny arrows in its wake. Or something. I'm not sure.
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real science. I couldn't solve a linear algebraic equation even if the world depended on it (sorry, world). Instead, I revere famous physicists from afar while most women my age drool over movie stars like What's-His-Face. You know the one. That really hott one.Anyway. Richard Feynman is definitely in the top five on my list of favorite physicists. (Yep, I have a list. Expect nothing less from a girl who named her cat Sagan.) I love Feynman's sense of humor and his whimsical world-view. He may be gone, but he's not forgotten. So when I had a stupid question about light, I figured it was high time I read his book on the subject. My stupid question goes like this: Why is it that, when you turn off a light, the room immediately goes dark? Where does the light go? Why doesn't it bounce around the room for a bit before dispersing? If light is everywhere, why is the universe so dark?
Well, this book didn't really help me answer those questions. If Feynman taught me anything here, it's that light is the honey badger of particles: it does what it wants, and leaves tiny arrows in its wake. Or something. I'm not sure.
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LibraryThing member drsabs
The theory is indeed strange and as Feynman emphasizes hard to understand why it would “work.” But it does and that is enough for the physicist. Feynman does try to make the explanation of the theory as clear as possible. He explains each case in writing but then illustrates with a diagram with
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its own commentary. A disciplined reader should be able to understand the basics of quantum electronic dynamics based on this book. Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
... 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
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 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...
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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 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...
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LibraryThing member Renzomalo
As Dr. Feynman said, "Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won't be able to understand wheat I am going to say? It is my task to convince you NOT to turn away because you don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand it either. That is because I don't
And that about sums it up. After a few futile attempts to read and understand what professor Feynman was saying, I finally just read it as though I was attending his lecture while sitting in the back row. Whatever fragments I picked up helped me fill in the gaps to my heretofore fragmented understanding of the subject. I learned some names, some theoretical ideas, and some vague notion as to how this might someday all fit together. And then I walked out of the lecture (put the book down) shaking my head and made myself a gin & tonic to celebrate the occasion.
Thank you Dr. Feynman! Four stars for the effort!
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understand it. NOBODY DOES." (Emphasis added)And that about sums it up. After a few futile attempts to read and understand what professor Feynman was saying, I finally just read it as though I was attending his lecture while sitting in the back row. Whatever fragments I picked up helped me fill in the gaps to my heretofore fragmented understanding of the subject. I learned some names, some theoretical ideas, and some vague notion as to how this might someday all fit together. And then I walked out of the lecture (put the book down) shaking my head and made myself a gin & tonic to celebrate the occasion.
Thank you Dr. Feynman! Four stars for the effort!
Show Less
LibraryThing member dcunning11235
Another great Feynman book. Every time I read something by him, I get re-excited about physics.
Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1985
Physical description
176 p.; 8.45 inches
ISBN
0691024170 / 9780691024172