Qed and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga: 29

Excellent copy and service. It arrived earlier! Thanks so much!

I am still reading it. I would suggest before buying this book one should read "QED, The Strange Theory of Light and Matter" by Richard Feynman. The author Silvan Schweber has done a good job of presenting the history of QED through the work of Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga. He provides the reader a short biography of each one and then explores their contribution to the evolution of QED in terms of the physics they did. Although I have a degree in mathematics, I found the mathematics in the book quite challenging. However, one can still get conceptual picture of the development of quantum electrodynamics through this book without a strong math background. I highly recommend this book to any one who wants to get a better understanding of the often weird quantum world.Stephen Spears

Everything one wants to know on how our civilization succeeded through science to interpret and master the laws of how nature exhibits herself to us. The scientific history of Quantum Electrodynamics from inside with every possible detail .

[updated 1/10/2014]This book is a very significant contribution to the history of fundamental physics in the 20th century.It is very well researched and the narrative makes excellent reading, providing many insights into the development of the theory. Silvan Schweber successfully ties together the complex story of QED, from Heisenberg and Pauli's first steps towards a quantised theory of fields; through Dirac's game-changing formulation of the relativistic electron field and prediction of anti-matter; via the decisive experimental inputs of Lamb, Rabi, Nafe and Nelson; on to Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga's independent and startlingly contrasting formulations of QED itself; finally to the profound work of Freeman Dyson in seeing the mathematical equivalence of the different formulations, thus providing the proof of QED's renormalisability to all orders. It is sadly ironic (as the author notes) that Dyson, who probably understood QED better than any of its three principal authors, was the only one not to receive the Nobel Prize for his contribution!The book is full of revealing historical gems. My favourite is the mini-biography of Dirac, with its illumination of Dirac's opinion of Bohr's views on Quantum Theory .... (p 17) In 1925 Bohr gave lectures at Cambridge which Dirac attended. Considering the possibility that Bohr's thoughts might have influenced Dirac's soon-to-be-published work on relativistic quantum mechanics, the author notes that Dirac's (1977) reaction to Bohr was mixed: "While I [Dirac] was very much impressed by [Bohr], his arguments were mainly of a qualitative nature, and I was not able to really pinpoint the facts behind them. What I wanted was statements which could be expressed in terms of equations, and Bohr's work very seldom provided such statements. I am not really sure how much my later work was influenced by these lectures of Bohr". Which was, of course, a polite way of saying the lectures had no influence at all on his later work! A close second is the description of the Shelter Island conference, with its summary of the proposed agenda for the "Foundations of Quantum Mechanics" session, as suggested by the three 'discussion leaders'; Kramers, Weisskopf and Oppenheimer. Weisskopf's outline of topics for discussion is characteristically broad, inclusive and relevant, spanning the Difficulties of QED, Nuclear and Meson phenomena and forces, High energy physics and Proposed Experiments. By contrast Oppenheimer's proposed agenda is almost embarrassingly myopic in its singular concentration on Cosmic-ray physics (Oppenheimer's own research area at the time) to the complete exclusion of all else! [2] Another gem is in the description of Dyson's work where Schweber informs us that ' Dyson pointed out that in Feynman's theory "the graph corresponding to a particular matrix element is regarded, not merely as an aid to calculation [4], but as a picture of the physical process which gives rise to that matrix element" '.Schweber's book contains numerous similarly revealing, entertaining and enlightening passages, so that I enjoyed it very much indeed and, when also considering the historical and technical breadth and depth of his research, it would certainly merit 5 stars. However, and unfortunately, there are three areas where the book certainly falls below that standard;First - the writing appears to be littered with transcription errors [1] that render many of the mathematical equations meaningless. Given that the author is attempting to write a "Scientific" biography of these physicists and their work it is a great pity that more care was not taken in the technical proof reading!Second - there are passages where the author's attempts at explanation, for the scientifically and mathematically literate but QED-non-specialist, are frustratingly opaque. This fault is at its most glaring in the passage starting on page 513, where the author attempts to paraphrase Dyson's proof, of the equivalence of Schwinger & Tomonaga's formulation to that of Feynman ... ' The derivation of these rules "from what is fundamentally the Schwinger-Tomonaga theory ...." ' , by cutting and pasting extracts from Dyson's paper. The result is a completely incomprehensible melange of undefined mathematical notation and commentary! I re-read it several times before finally resorting in desperation to Dyson's original, which I had never read, but which was instantly clear and coherent by comparison! [3]Third - and most importantly, the book is very seriously unbalanced by the minimalist account of San-Itiro Tomonaga and his work. Schweber devotes 100 pages each to Schwinger, Feynman and Dyson, but a miserly 25 pages to the Japanese physicist. This is a fundamental flaw in the book, notwithstanding Schweber's apparently sincere apologies for this imbalance in the Preface. But those apologies are, to a large extent, undermined by a number of remarks in the book, culminating in the Postscript on page 572: "Without minimising in any way Tomonaga's accomplishments, it seems to me that the developments in the period from 1947 to 1950 would not have been substantially different without him ..." !! This may well be true, but would certainly have been better left unsaid, because *exactly* the same could be said of Julian Schwinger's contribution! Had Schwinger and Tomonaga's brains (and linguistic abilities) been switched in 1947, QED would probably have evolved in much the same way. In fact there is a potentially convincing argument that, had Tomonaga been in Schwinger's position, the development and wider understanding of QED would have advanced more rapidly because of Tomonaga's inclusive, pragmatic and explanatory style, which contrasted sharply with the exclusive and abstract mathematical exhibitionism of Schwinger! This third and most serious fault in the book would, by itself, merit the reduction from 5 stars to 3.============[1] A number of errors are caused by confusion of three characters that, when (poorly) handwritten, can be easily mistaken for each other, particularly if the person who was transcribing from Schweber's notes was not familiar with the normal conventions of physics notation. The characters are;Lower case 'v' and the lower case Greek letters 'nu' and 'gamma'. Equations affected are on p 10 (for the average energy in a black-body radiation field, where 'volume v' and 'frequency nu' are confused) and on page 32 (for Dirac's prior derivation of the so-called Breit-Wigner distribution, where 'frequency nu' and 'spectral line-width gamma' are confused). There may well be others but I did not check the details beyond the first 100 pages.[2] Read the biography for supporting evidence on the strange and unbalanced character of JRO.[3] You can find a (pirate) copy of the original here <http://web.ihep.su/dbserv/compas/src/dyson49/eng.pdf>: See section 6 "Calculation of Matrix Elements" starting on page 14.[4] As was the case in Schwinger's formulation.

While this is meant to be a historical account of the development of QED, it turns out to be much more than that. The actual physics described in the book - is well explained - and is typically viewed from the eyes of originator(s) of the theory. For e.g. how Dirac came up with the formulation of the relativistic wave equation or how Feynman originated his famous diagrams. That type of 'how did the theory's originator derive this..' provides a deeper understanding of the physics - than just reading the equation(s) in a textbook.