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LECTURE 39
     goals and outline

lecture title

    Quantum Field Theory: Feynman's Dynamics

text pages

    Ch 19, pp 234-239.

lecture goals

  • Review what we've learned about kinematics and dynamics in three units.
  • Review what we know to be quantized so far from early quantum theory.
  • Consider how a field can be quantized.
  • Learn another place where the Uncertainty Principle provides the mechanism for a phenomenon which would be impossible classically.
  • Learn what the "Standard Model" of Quantum Field Theory is
  • Learn how simple Feynman diagrams are constructed and what the simplest Feynman rules are.
  • See how Quantum Field Theory preserves Newton's Second Law.

outline of lecture

    1. Kinematics and Dynamics

    2. Forces and Fields

    3. Feynman Rules for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)

    (4. NOVA Video)

quotes

I can't understand anything in general unless I'm carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go.

-- Richard P. Feynman

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ``But how can it be like that?'' because you will go ``down the drain'' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

-- Richard P. Feynman

Furthermore, in the search for new laws, you always have the psychological excitement of feeling that...nobody has yet thought of the crazy possibility you are looking at right now.

-- Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize Lecture, 1965

I can live with doubt and uncertainty. I think it's much more interesting to live NOT knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

-- Richard P. Feynman

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Please email any questions, comments, or suggestions to Professor Bernice Durand, bdurand@theory3.physics.wisc.edu.

Revised December 2, 1997.


Content © 1997, Bernice Durand
Images and layout © 1997, Shane Hamilton