Quantum Electrodynamics - annotated sources. Volume I. - Trevor Underwood

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Résumé :
This is not a sourcebook in the conventional sense. It is a working document which brings together annotated extracts from 107 primary sources, or translations of them, of the development of quantum electrodynamics, so that it is easier for a researcher to deal with the large volume of material. Links to internet copies of the primary documents or alternative sources are provided where available to enable these to be consulted. A summary is provided at the head of each paper and in the Contents. The references in each paper are expanded to include the title (and its translation where relevant), and a copy of the summary where this is available and helpful to avoid unnecessary cross referencing. Biographies of the main contributors are also provided, of which 18 received Nobel Prizes in Physics. The chronological development of the theories of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics constituted an interesting interplay between theory and experiment. Volume I, covering the period from 1896 to 1931 is primarily focused on the development of the largely successful non-relativistic theory of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. The 2nd Edition of Volume I includes descriptions of the Lagrangian on pages 36-7 and of the Schr?dinger equation and quantum superposition on pages 483-5. Volume II, covering the period from 1930 up until 1965, when Tomonaga, Feynman, and Schwinger received their Nobel prizes, addresses the attempts to formulate a relativistic quantum electrodynamics, or quantum field theory, for the electron, when the energy of the electron is relativistic, and in particular to address, through a process of renormalization, the still unresolved divergencies arising largely, if not entirely, from the assumption of a point electron....

Biographie:
Trevor Underwood was born in England in 1943, and became a US citizen in 2004. He earned a M.A. in mathematics and physics at Cambridge University, in 1965, and a M.Sc. in economics at the London School of Economics in 1967, followed by further graduate studies in international economics at the University of Rochester, NY, and at Harvard University, between 1967 and 1969. He worked for the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund, and the UK Treasury and was a UK Advisor to the Committee of Twenty on Reform of the International Monetary System, between 1969 and 1973. He founded a treasury consultancy business in 1974 and a treasury software company in 1976, which he continued to run until 2017. In 2008 he returned to scientific research, initially on human evolution. In November 2015, he published a paper A new model of human dispersal on bioRxiv.org, the online preprint archive for biology run by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Between December 2015 and November 2019, he worked on climate science, during which time he wrote six climate science papers. In November 2019, these were published in a book The Surface Temperature of the Earth, distributed by Lulu.com. He then returned to theoretical physics to review progress since he left Cambridge in 1965, in particular on electromagnetic radiation, matter and gravity. In December 2021, he published a spin-off from this research, Urbain Le Verrier on the Movement of Mercury - annotated translations, distributed by Lulu.com. In April 2023, he published Quantum Electrodynamics - annotated sources. Volumes I and II...