QED - Richard Feynman ****

When a book is a classic of the field it can be easy to forget to review it. Richard Feynman's 1985 QED is one of the best-thumbed books on my shelves, and still in print - so it seemed sensible to cover it. Because Feynman has a number of books with his name on the cover from his remarkable anecdotes in Surely You are Joking Mister Feynman? to the anything-but-popular-science Red Book (The Feynman Lectures on Physics), it can be a surprise to realise that he never wrote a book per se. What we get in print is either transcripts of lectures, shorter pieces collected or interviews.

In the case of QED it was a lecture series given at UCLA to cover quantum electrodynamics - as the subtitle tells us, the strange theory of light and matter (and particularly light and electrons where much of the interaction takes place). Feynman tells us that the book 'purports to be a record of the lectures', but has been significantly edited by Ralph Leighton. Along the way, the reader gains an insight into Feynman diagrams, but most of all into the way that the interactions between light and matter are not like the classical ideas of a wave or a particle, say, bouncing off a mirror, but instead involve a more complex and far more fascinating interplay where phase and probability amplitudes have to be considered.

One thing you can certainly say about this book is it's a source of some Feynman's most famous quotes, notably '[Y]ou think I’m going to explain it to you so you can understand it? No, you’re not going to be able to understand it. Why, then, am I going to bother you with all this? Why are you going to sit here all this time, when you won’t be able to understand what I am going to say? It is my task to persuade you not to turn away because you don’t understand it. You see, my physics students don’t understand it either. This is because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.'

In a sense this is borderline as popular science. It's certainly aimed at the public, and doesn't contain much in the way of mathematics, but you do have to work a little to follow some of the more obscure sections.  Feynman says 'Many "popular" expositions of science achieve apparent simplicity only by describing something different, something considerably distorted from what they claim to be describing. Respect for our subject did not permit us to do this.' And this does sometimes mean more detail and fiddly diagrams than can make for ideal readability.

It remains an important book, both in terms of getting a look at quantum electrodynamics from the horse's mouth and as a historical document in its own right. I've got a lot from this book and I hope you will too.

Bizarrely, although you can buy this book on Kindle in German it doesn't appear to be available this way in English.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here