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.

    Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics
    Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics
    Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics
    Ebook217 pages4 hours

    Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics

    By Walter E. Thirring

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics concentrates on one of the best understood parts of quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics. It emphasizes the physical basis of the theory and avoids purely mathematical details. For this reason, the book should not be taken as a handbook of field theory, but rather as a compendium of the most characteristic and interesting results which have been obtained up to now. The book is organized into four parts. Part I develops the general mathematical framework, covering units and orders of magnitude, classical electrodynamics, and the general formalism of the quantum theory of fields. Part II deals with free fields. It examines some problems concerning the physical interpretation of the theory and asks whether the quantization procedure adopted actually introduces quantum characteristics and, if so, how these are expressed by the formalism. It also investigates the expectation values of more complicated expressions. Part III examines the effects of a mechanism which produces the particles under consideration; i.e., an external source of the fields. Part IV deals with quantum fields in interaction. The focus is on the case of a quantized electromagnetic field, the source of which is a quantized Dirac field.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAcademic Press
    Release dateOct 22, 2013
    ISBN9781483275864
    Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics

    Related to Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics

    Related ebooks

    Physics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Math That Takes Newton Into the Quantum World

      Feb 28, 2019

      In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the study of geometry using algebra. Around 1637, René Descartes laid the groundwork for this subject by taking a plane,

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Sacred, Spherical Cows of Physics: Theoretical physics milks symmetry to power its newest tool.

      May 1, 2014

      Early in their training, many physics students come across the idea of spherical cows. Cows in the real world—even at their most plump and well-fed—are hardly spherical, and this makes it tricky to calculate things like, say, how their volume or surf

      11 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

    • Article

      Why Mathematicians Should Stop Naming Things After Each Other

      Sep 2, 2020

      Any student of modern math must know what it feels like to drown in a well of telescoping terminology. For a high-profile example, let’s take the Calabi-Yau manifold, made famous by string theory. A Calabi-Yau manifold is a compact, complex Kähler ma

      6 min read

    • Article

      Physics Has Demoted Mass

      Nov 9, 2017

      You’re sitting here, reading this article. Maybe it’s a hard copy, or an e-book on a tablet computer or e-reader. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re reading it on, we can be reasonably sure it’s made of some kind of stuff: paper, card, plastic, perha

      10 min read

    • Article

      The Admiral of the String Theory Wars: After a decade, Peter Woit still thinks string theory is a gory mess.

      May 7, 2015

      Watching Peter Woit lecture on quantum mechanics to a class at Columbia University—speaking softly, tapping out equations on a blackboard—it’s hard to imagine why a Harvard physicist once publicly compared him to a terrorist and called for his death.

      8 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

      A Supermassive Lens On The Constants Of Nature

      Nov 25, 2020

      The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three researchers who confirmed that Einstein’s general relativity predicts black holes, and established that the center of our own galaxy houses a supermassive black hole with the equivalent of 4 million suns

      9 min read

    • Article

      How Physics Is Like Three-Chord Rock: Like a set of common chords, the same math appears in diverse fields of physics.

      Jun 12, 2014

      A few years back, 12 million of us clicked over to watch the “Pachelbel Rant” on YouTube. You might remember it. Strumming repetitive chords on his guitar, comedian Rob Paravonian confessed that when he was a cellist, he couldn’t stand the Pachelbel

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Universe Made of Tiny, Random Chunks: The space-time that makes up our universe is inherently uncertain.

      Jun 6, 2013

      One of science’s most crucial yet underappreciated achievements is the description of the physical universe using mathematics—in particular, using continuous, smooth mathematical functions, like how a sine wave describes both light and sound. This is

      6 min read

    • Article

      What You’re Doing Right Now Is Proof of Quantum Theory

      Nov 24, 2021

      Nobody understands quantum mechanics,” Richard Feynman famously said. Long after Max Planck’s discovery in 1900 that energy comes in separate packets or quanta, quantum physics remains enigmatic. It is vastly different from how things work at bigger

      8 min read

    • Article

      Fine Tuning Is Just Fine

      Sep 20, 2018

      It is hard to overstate the anticipation that preceded the opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 10 years ago. Smashing protons together at energies well above those produced at any previous particle accelerator, the LHC seemed capable of vindic

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Universe Began With a Big Melt, Not a Big Bang

      Oct 5, 2017

      There are two tantalizing mysteries about our universe, one dealing with its final fate and the other with its beginning, that have intrigued cosmologists for decades. The community has always believed these to be independent problems—but what if the

      10 min read

    • Article

      Quantum 101

      Nov 9, 2021

      We have a man called Max Planck to blame for all this. His discovery of energy quanta—the idea that the heat or light coming off something is not a constant force, but a stream of little lumps—won him the Nobel Prize in 1918. This threw open the whol

      1 min read

    • Article

      Quantum 101

      Dec 27, 2021

      We have a man called Max Planck to blame for all this. His discovery of energy quanta – the idea that the heat or light coming off something is not a constant force, but a stream of little lumps – won him the Nobel Prize in 1918. This threw open the

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Principles of Quantum Electrodynamics - Walter E. Thirring

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1