Abstract
From the time of his thesis and during his struggle to understand the Dirac equation, Feynman is preoccupied with finding the quantity that will determine the evolution of the wave function. While working on his thesis, he finds that the time evolution of the wave function is determined by the classical action, which is integrated along the possible paths that connect the start and end points of the particle. There is no classical action in the Dirac equation’s description of quantum electrodynamics (QED), since the equation introduced a new degree of freedom: spin. In RMP48, Feynman constructs an action that yields the Dirac equation using his quantization method. However, because he cannot justify the action independently, Feynman considers this treatment to be “purely formal” and unsatisfactory (see Section 3.5).
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- 1.
Schrödinger 1930.
- 2.
See, e. g., Galison 1998.
- 3.
Feynman uses units where \(\hbar=1\).
- 4.
See ThPos, equation (2).
- 5.
ThPos, equation (3).
- 6.
ThPos, p. 750.
- 7.
ThPos, p. 752.
- 8.
ThPos, equation (12).
- 9.
ThPos, equation (17).
- 10.
ThPos, p. 750.
- 11.
ThPos, p. 750.
- 12.
ThPos, p. 751.
- 13.
An objection was actually made, probably by Edward Teller, at the conference held at Pocono Manor, Pennsylvania, in 1948 (Weiner 1966, p. 35).
- 14.
Weiner 1966, p. 32.
- 15.
Theory of Positrons; Self-Energy in an Atom; Radiation Scattering; Spreading Dirac Packet, folio 6; cf. Schweber 1994, p. 430f.
- 16.
Cf. Sauer (2008, p. 8).
- 17.
See, e. g., Fermi 1932, Part III.
- 18.
CutOffCl; CutOffQ.
- 19.
CutOffQ, pp. 1434, 1437.
- 20.
- 21.
Feynman has introduced this notation in his previous paper, ThPos, p. 757.
- 22.
Dirac Equation a, folio 12, see Section 4.4.
- 23.
References
Theory of Positrons; Self-Energy in an Atom; Radiation Scattering; Spreading Dirac Packet. (Ca. 1948). Series of selected folios from Box 13, Folder 1.
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Wüthrich, A. (2010). Free Propagation and Successive Scattering. In: The Genesis of Feynman Diagrams. Archimedes, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9228-1_5
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