Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman | |
|---|---|
| Born | May 11, 1918 New York City, United States |
| Died | February 15, 1988 (aged 69) Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Path-integral formulation, Feynman diagrams, renormalized quantum electrodynamics, the parton model, the Feynman Lectures on Physics |
| Awards | Nobel Prize in Physics (1965) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics |
| Institutions | Los Alamos Laboratory, Cornell University, California Institute of Technology |
Richard Phillips Feynman (11 May 1918 – 15 February 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, one of the architects of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, and the source of the diagrammatic method that became the working language of particle physics. On this wiki he appears chiefly as the author of arguments that contributors here dispute, and as the physicist whose own doubts about renormalization are most often quoted back at the theory.
Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, taught at Cornell from 1945 and at Caltech from 1950. Between 1947 and 1949 he, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga independently produced formulations of quantum electrodynamics in which the divergent integrals of the theory are absorbed into redefinitions of the measured mass and charge of the electron; Freeman Dyson showed the three formulations to be equivalent, and the three shared the 1965 Nobel Prize. Feynman's route ran through his path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics, in which an amplitude is computed by summing a phase over every possible history, and through the diagrams that encode the terms of the perturbation expansion.
His other work includes the V−A theory of the weak interaction with Murray Gell-Mann (1958), the parton model of deep inelastic scattering (1969), an account of superfluid helium, and the 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", often cited as an origin point for nanotechnology. The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964) remain in print. In 1986 he served on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger accident, where his demonstration of the O-ring seals' loss of resilience in ice water became the public face of the inquiry, and his appended personal observations ended with the sentence that "reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
Feynman was blunt about the parts of his own subject he did not think were understood. He described renormalization as a "dippy process" and a "shell game", and wrote that no satisfactory mathematical justification for it had been found — a judgement quoted approvingly by several of the researchers documented here. His 1974 Caltech commencement address on "cargo cult science", on the difference between the appearance and the substance of scientific method, is likewise a common reference among critics of orthodoxy.
On this wiki
The Quantum Electrodynamics article here states the standard case accurately — the Lamb shift, and the agreement of the electron's anomalous magnetic moment with calculation to roughly ten significant figures — and then sets out the objections raised in the literature catalogued here. Those objections are aimed at method rather than at arithmetic: at renormalization, at the physical status of virtual particles, and at the claim that the g−2 agreement constitutes proof.
The most detailed historical challenge is Oliver Consa's essay "Something is wrong in the state of QED", which argues that the theory's reputation for precision rests almost entirely on the electron g-factor and examines the history of those computations, including the Karplus and Kroll episode. Consa's alternative is structural rather than perturbative: a ring and helical-solenoid electron whose g-factor follows from its geometry — the tradition of Alfred L Parson's toroidal ring and of Common Sense Science, where Paul Wesley and David L Bergman derive the anomalous moment from an extended spinning charged ring, and Harold Aspden derives it from aether structure.
Papers here that engage Feynman's arguments directly:
- Jan Olof Jonson, Refutation of Feynman's Derivation of the Lienard-Wiechert Potentials (Journal of New Energy, 2003), which disputes the retardation argument by which the potentials of a moving charge are usually obtained.
- Randell L Mills, The Fallacy of Feynman's and Related Arguments on the Stability of the Hydrogen Atom According to Quantum Mechanics (Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie, 2005), which denies that the uncertainty principle is what prevents the hydrogen atom from radiative collapse, and argues that a non-radiation condition on an extended charge distribution does the work instead.
- Francis Viren Fernandes, Feynman Apologetics (2009), on the treatment of the electron volt as a unit of energy in the Feynman Lectures.
More broadly, Paul Wesley rejects the quantum formalism outright in The Failure of Quantum Mechanics (1996); Howard C Hayden presses the incompatibility between the observer assumed by quantum field theory and the observer assumed by Special Relativity; and Alexander L Kholmetskii argues in Classical Electrodynamics of Point-Like Charges Without Divergences (2006) that the divergences renormalization was invented to absorb are an artefact of treating charges as points — the same diagnosis reached from a different direction by Charles William Lucas and the finite-size-particle programme.
What the material here does not claim is that QED's predictions are wrong. The disagreement is over whether a procedure that subtracts infinities to fit measured constants counts as an explanation, and over whether the extended-structure models can be developed far enough to replace it. That the perturbation series is asymptotic rather than convergent, and that QED is generally treated as an effective theory with a high-energy cutoff, are points conceded in the mainstream literature as well.