QED (book)
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QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Alix G. Mautner Memorial Lectures) is a book by Richard Feynman consisting of four lectures which describe, for the general reader, quantum electrodynamics. This book is aimed at teaching students to understand what's going on behind the calculations, not at teaching students to do calculations.
The book was first published in 1985 by Princeton University Press. On page 1, however, Feynman makes passing reference to the fact that the general lectures on QED were first delivered in New Zealand. Indeed, these lectures were given in 1979 at the University of Auckland, and were known as the Sir Douglas Robb lectures. Videotapes of these lectures were made publicly available on a not-for-profit basis in 1996 and, more recently, have been placed online by the Vega Science Trust educational charity (see [www.vega.org.uk]). A discussion of the major differences between the original Auckland lectures and the published version of QED was given in the American Journal of Physics in 1996.
The goal of this book is to explain the purpose of QED, as he described in his book: "People always ask me to unify this theory with that theory, that theory with this theory. They never let us explain what we have now" (inexact quoting from book).
In the first lecture "Photons - Corpuscles of Light", Feynman describes the basic properties of photons and thus acts as a gentle lead into the subject (as he colloquially stated before that a science lecture is boring if either it's not using layman terms or saying something upside down).
The second lecture "Quantum Behavior" describes Quantum phenomenons such as the famous double-slit experiment and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, thus describing the transmission and reflection of photons.
The third lecture describes his famous "Feynman diagrams" and the interaction of subatomic particle, which is initially Quantum electrodynamics.
The fourth lecture describes the meaning of Quantum electrodynamics and the future of physics (the "holy grail" of physics).
References
The Vega Science Trust - Richard Feynman The videos are only available as .rm format. [The Vega Science Trust]
External links
- [Recordings of QED held in New Zealand] (streaming video)
- [Recordings of QED held in New Zealand] (DVD)
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