Related papers: Richard Feynman's talent for finding things out
The genesis of Feynman's original approach to QED is reviewed. The main ideas of his original presentation at the Pocono Conference are discussed and compared with the ones involved in his action-at-distance formulation of classical…
The double slit interference experiment has been famously described by Richard Feynman as containing the "only mystery of quantum mechanics". The history of quantum mechanics is intimately linked with the discovery of the dual nature of…
We study Feynman checkers, an elementary model of electron motion introduced by R. Feynman. In this model, a checker moves on a checkerboard, and we count the turns. Feynman checkers are also known as a one-dimensional quantum walk. We…
As R.Feynman has shown to F. Dyson -- who published it then in 1990 under the name of "Feynman's proof of Maxwell's equations" -- the only interactions compatible with the canonical uncertainty relation (for scalar particles on flat $\R^3$)…
This essay gives a short, informal account of the development of digital logic from the Pleistocene to the Manhattan Project, the introduction of reversible circuits, and Richard Feynman's allied proposal for quantum computing. We argue…
Feynman gave a famous elementary introduction to quantum theory by discussing the thin-film reflection of light. We make his discussion mathematically rigorous, keeping it elementary, using his other idea. The resulting model leads to…
Major technological advances of the past century are rooted in our understanding of quantum physics in the non-interacting limit. A central challenge today is to understand the behavior of complex quantum many-body systems, where…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
The reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
We introduce an original model of quantum phenomena, a model that provides a picture of a "deep structure", an "underlying pattern" of quantum dynamics. We propose that the source of a particle and all of that particle's possible detectors…
Envisioned by Richard Feynman in the early 1980s, quantum simulation has received dramatic impetus thanks to the development of a variety of plateforms able to emulate a wide class of quantum Hamiltonians. During the past decade, most of…
Double-slit diffraction is a corner stone of quantum mechanics. It illustrates key features of quantum mechanics: interference and the particle-wave duality of matter. In 1965, Richard Feynman presented a thought experiment to show these…
This talk is dedicated to Alberto Sirlin in celebration of his seventieth birthday. I wish to convey my deep appreciation of his many important contributions to particle physics over 40 years and look forward to many more years of…
Freeman J. Dyson, a brilliant theoretical physicist and a gifted mathematician, passed away on 28 February 2020 at the age of 96. A vignette of his outstanding contributions to physical sciences, ranging from the subject of quantum…
A paper of Thomas Young (1773-1829) on the behavior of streams of air makes a good starting point for discussing the not always fair, sometimes serendipitous, association of a physical phenomenon with its discoverer. In a didactic context,…
This note is sketching a simple and natural mathematical construction for explaining the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. It employs nonstandard analysis and is based on Feynman's interpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainty…
Feynman amplitudes in perturbation theory form the basis for most predictions in particle collider experiments. The mathematical quantities which occur as amplitudes include values of the Riemann zeta function and relate to fundamental…
The unification of gravity and quantum mechanics remains one of the most profound open questions in science. With recent advances in quantum technology, an experimental idea first proposed by Richard Feynman is now regarded as a promising…
We take attention to the singular behavior of the Laplace operator in spherical coordinates, which was established in our earlier work. This singularity has many non-trivial consequences. In this article we consider only the simplest ones,…
In his famous undergraduate physics lectures, Richard Feynman remarked about the problem of fluid turbulence: "Nobody in physics has really been able to analyze it mathematically satisfactorily in spite of its importance to the sister…