Abstract
Soon after its invention, quantum mechanics was superseded by the quantized theory of fields, which by now has reached a stage where the theory is firmly established and generally believed to provide a consistent and almost complete description of nature. It is designed so as to incorporate both the principles of quantum mechanics and the laws of special relativity. Still, despite its many successes, the theory is undoubtedly beset with great conceptual difficulties and paradoxes of infinity which prompted theoreticians to seek alternative formulations and to recast the theory over and over again until it became a practical language for describing the observed processes among elementary particles.
Die Sprache der Mathematik erweist sich als über alle Maßen effektiv, ein wunderbares Geschenk, das wir weder verstehen noch verdienen. Wir sollten dafür dankbar sein und hoffen, daß sie auch bei zukünftigen Forschungen ihre Gültigkeit behält und daß sie sich — in Freud und in Leid, zu unserem Vergnügen wie vielleicht auch zu unserer Verwirrung — auf viele Wissenszweige ausdehnt. E. Wigner
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Roepstorff, G. (1994). Euclidean Field Theory. In: Path Integral Approach to Quantum Physics. Texts and Monographs in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57886-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-57886-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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