In "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter", Richard Feynman attempts to explain to the general public, the theory which won him his Nobel Prize. Quantum electrodynamics, or 'QED' for short, explains how light interacts with electrons, which is the underlying process behind every single interaction in the universe (except gravitation and nuclear processes).
Feynman commences these lectures by explicitly stating that since physics is an experimental science, it is futile to question 'why' physical phenomena play out the way they do. Instead, it deals with how these phenomena take place. Keeping up with this spirit, these lectures handle how physicists calculate these interactions of light, not why they occur.
QED is a theory which took decades to formulate, and involves abstruse mathematics. Studying it takes years of college education. Feynman condenses the essence of these years of research into four concise lectures. I found it remarkable how he was able to explain such a complex theory with the simple analogy of little arrows, of different lengths and angles.
Very rarely would I call science 'beautiful', but I was left truly astounded by how mesmerizing QED is. It explains so many phenomena I had learnt about earlier in school, which I thought to be 'classical'. Feynman shows that things like iridescence, refraction, and converging lenses are fundamentally governed by quantum mechanics. Even the fundamentals of chemistry are determined by QED. And again, all of these phenomena can be represented by simple arrows.
Still, if Feynman's goal was to make the common person, who has absolutely no prior knowledge of science, understand QED, he would not have completely succeeded. While he attempts to use everyday vocabulary, occasionally he casually throws around some scientific jargon like the 'uncertainty principle', among others. These terms would be incomprehensible to someone with little knowledge of quantum mechanics. I would not have been able to understand half of this book without my knowledge of middle school optics and basic quantum theory. Towards the end of this book, when he discusses different elementary particles, he incessantly mentions 'spin', which determines the differences between different particles. However, he never clarifies what exactly 'spin' is. There were many such instances where Feynman could have excluded unnecessary, convoluted terminology, in order to make it more accessible to the layman.
Despite its flaws, QED is a fascinating expatiation on a beautiful field of physics, which I thoroughly enjoyed. If you have a strong foundation of some basic physics, and genuine interest towards the subject, you will certainly find the content of this book exciting and edifying. If not, you just may not appreciate it just as much.
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