Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
    QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
    QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
    Ebook225 pages3 hours

    QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

    By Richard P. Feynman and Anthony Zee

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Feynman’s bestselling introduction to the mind-blowing physics of QED—presented with humor, not mathematics

    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 public. In this extraordinary book, Feynman provides a lively and accessible introduction to QED, or quantum electrodynamics, an area of quantum field theory that describes 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 the substance and spirit of QED to the nonscientist.

    With an incisive introduction by A. Zee that places Feynman’s contribution to QED in historical context and highlights Feynman’s uniquely appealing and illuminating style, this Princeton Science Library edition of QED makes Feynman’s legendary talks on quantum electrodynamics available to a new generation of readers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 26, 2014
    ISBN9781400847464
    QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

    Read more from Richard P. Feynman

    Related authors

    Related to QED

    Titles in the series (49)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Physics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Is Quantum Physics Linked To Consciousness?

      Jan 16, 2021

      WHILE most of us have only heard about quantum physics by watching the Big Bang Theory, a week doing nuclear physics in matric led to a fascination for quantum physics – and whether it plays a role in the workings of the brain – for UKZN PhD student

      3 min read

    • Article

      What Keeps Black Holes From Expanding Everywhere?

      Dec 10, 2018

      Black holes are somehow able to grow constantly without changing their size. Physics might finally be able to explain why.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The THEORY of EVERYTHING

      Jun 20, 2019

      The THEORY of EVERYTHING
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Multiple Multiverses May Be One and the Same

      Jan 26, 2017

      The name of the image—the “Flammarion engraving”—may not ring a bell, but you’ve seen it many times. It depicts a traveler wearing a cloak and clutching a walking-stick; behind him is a varied landscape of towns and trees; surrounding all is a crysta

      11 min read

    • Article

      The Metaphysical Baggage of Physics: Lee Smolin argues that time is more fundamental than physical laws.

      Jan 30, 2014

      An issue on time would not be complete without a conversation with Lee Smolin. High school dropout, theoretical physicist, and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin’s life and work reflect many

      7 min read

    • Article

      Why The Flow Of Time Is An Illusion

      Apr 25, 2019

      In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” In this month’s issue of Nautilus, which looks at the concept of flow through various port

      6 min read

    • Article

      Actually, There Is a Time Like the Present

      Nov 30, 2017

      We’ve all heard it before: There’s no time like the present. Broadly speaking, of course, it means to “seize the opportunity right now,” or maybe in my case, to avoid procrastinating. From a psychological perspective, this makes a lot of sense. As hu

      4 min read

    • Article

      Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute

      May 4, 2017

      Once you start poking around in the muck of consciousness studies, you will soon encounter the specter of Sir Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist with an audacious—and quite possibly crackpot—theory about the quantum origins of consciousness

      11 min read

    • Article

      Is It Time to Get Rid of Time?

      Sep 20, 2018

      Poets often think of time as a river, a free-flowing stream that carries us from the radiant morning of birth to the golden twilight of old age. It is the span that separates the delicate bud of spring from the lush flower of summer. Physicists think

      11 min read

    • Article

      Evil Triumphs in These Multiverses, and God Is Powerless

      Mar 2, 2017

      The challenge that the multiverse poses for the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God is often focused on fine-tuning. If there are infinite universes, then we don’t need a fine tuner to explain why the conditions of our universe are perfect for life

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Quantum Mechanics of Fate: How time travel might explain some of science’s biggest puzzles.

      Jan 30, 2014

      The objective world simply is, it does not happen,” wrote mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1949. From his point of view, the universe is laid out in time as surely as it is laid out in space. Time does not pass, and the past and future are

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Theory of Consciousness Can Help Build a Theory of Everything

      May 4, 2017

      For an empirical science, physics can be remarkably dismissive of some of our most basic observations. We see objects existing in definite locations, but the wave nature of matter washes that away. We perceive time to flow, but how could it, really?

      15 min read

    • Article

      Quantum Mechanics 101

      Dec 5, 2019

      Quantum Mechanics 101
      7 min read

    • Article

      When Einstein Tilted at Windmills: The young physicist’s quest to prove the theories of Ernst Mach.

      Dec 1, 2016

      When they met, Einstein wasn’t Einstein yet. He was just Albert Einstein, a kid, about 17, with a dark cloud of teenage angst and a violin. Michele Besso was older, 23, but a kindred spirit. Growing up in Trieste, Italy he had shown an impressive kna

      14 min read

    • Article

      A Brief History of the Grand Unified Theory of Physics

      Mar 16, 2017

      Particle physicists had two nightmares before the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012. The first was that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator would see precisely nothing. For if it did, it would likely be the last large accelerator

      18 min read

    • Article

      Dark Energy?

      Dec 29, 2022

      Dark Energy?
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Mystery of Time’s Arrow

      Apr 4, 2019

      As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter and do not reassemble themselves. Above all, we age and become de

      9 min read

    • Article

      How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time

      Jan 24, 2019

      An Introduction to the Black Hole Institute Fittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations for general relativity—a solution that described a black hole decades before the first a

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for QED

    4/5

    434 ratings20 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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 about QED.
    • 5/5
      Feynman is the best author in the field of physics. In his easy-going, humorous style, he covers the sticky topic of Quantum ElectroDynamics.
    • 5/5
      A science classic. Short and sweet exposition of quantum electrodynamics. A must-read for anyone interested in how the world works.
    • 5/5
      About every two or three years I reread this book and I still enjoy it as much as the first time.
    • 5/5
      A brilliant book written by a brilliant physicist.I really liked it
    • 5/5
      Top class... Must read for anyone who wants to know how the world works...
    • 5/5
      Excellent book and very useful. I love it !!! Please, include more books like this one.
    • 5/5
      I've read it twice. Now I get it! Seriously, folks, so many mysteries about everyday observations (how do mirrors work and many more) get cleared up here. And, for a bonus, what is still baffling is outlined in the final chapter.
      And , for a better bonus, Feynman's style, informal, fun, clear, honest.
    • 4/5
      ... 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 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...
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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 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!
    • 4/5
      Mr. Feynman does a nice job explaining complex topic in simple terms so that person can follow his lecture on the nature of light and matter at the atomic level.
    • 5/5
      Another great Feynman book. Every time I read something by him, I get re-excited about physics.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Utterly and completely brilliant.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Quantenelektrodynamik ist keine einfache Sache. Feynman erklärt sie gut, aber trotzdem muss man sich für das Buch Zeit lassen und reindenken. Ich gestehe, dass ich mich nicht angemessen vertieft und deshalb nur Ansätze verstanden habe. Dennoch: Selbst mir ist manches begreiflicher geworden. Und da ich das Buch besitze, kann ich es ja nochmal in Ruhe versuchen.
    • 5/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
       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 have only given this book three stars.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Just the facts, Ma'am, August 6, 2006In 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 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!

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    QED - Richard P. Feynman

    QED

    1

    Introduction

    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’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

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1