First published 2013
This German translation presents Freeman Dyson's quantum field theory lectures delivered at Cornell University in 1951. Dyson demonstrates the equivalence between Richard Feynman's path integral approach and Julian Schwinger's variational methods in quantum electrodynamics, proving QED's consistency. The theoretical physicist Edwin Thompson Jaynes noted that for a generation of physicists, these lectures were clearer and better motivated than Feynman's work, yet more compact than Schwinger's approach. The book covers seven key areas: the Dirac equation, scattering problems and Born approximation, classical and quantum mechanical field theory, examples of quantized field theories including Maxwell fields and Dirac electrons, free particle scattering problems such as pair annihilation and Möller scattering with the Klein-Nishina formula, general scattering theory featuring Feynman graphs and infrared catastrophe, and scattering in static potentials with experimental results. Readers will benefit from Dyson's characteristically clear style in these previously unpublished German lectures.
Genres: science-fiction, 20th-century, physics, academic
Vibes: academic, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: academic, historical
Setting: Cornell University
Period: 1951
317 pages · Paperback · Springer Spektrum