Some insight into Feynman’s approach to electromagnetism

Mauro, Marco Di; Luca, R. De; Esposito, Salvatore; Naddeo, Adele

doi:10.1088/1361-6404/abcee5

Cited by 4 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…The question of course arises, whether he did take inspiration by reading their book or rather devised his approach in a completely independent fashion. This same issue, concerning the formulation of electromagnetism, was considered by the present authors in [12].…”

Section: Further Elaborationsupporting

confidence: 52%

“…[13], p.35). This is of course true for electromagnetism, as Feynman declared in several places [12], and it is true for gravity as well. As a matter of fact, even Feynman's considerations in classical gravity, dealing mainly with gravitational waves, have their roots in quantum physics.…”

Section: Introducing the Charactermentioning

confidence: 84%

“…Besides many similarities with the more famous 1962-63 Caltech lectures [6], this treatment displays several original points, probably due to Feynman's thoughts in the years between the two courses. In those years, as we reported elsewhere [11,12], another of Feynman's concerns was the development of a different derivation of Maxwell's equations, thus finding an original way of addressing the teaching of electromagnetism. Probably inspired by these thoughts, in the Hughes lectures Feynman suggested that a similar approach, with suitable modifications, could be adopted 1 "The problem of the relation of gravitation to the rest of physics is one of the outstanding theoretical problems of our age"( [1], p. 15); "My subject is the quantum theory of gravitation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…H. Bondi and J. Weber were among the people who attended the Chapel Hill conference. Bondi likely envisaged independently an argument similar to that of Feynman, 12 and shortly after the con-ference he published a variant of the sticky bead device [30], although he didn't succeed to relate the intensity of the gravitational wave to the amount of the energy carried by it. The fact that gravitational waves were real and physical was rigorously proved, in the framework of full nonlinear general relativity, not much later, by people like Bondi himself, Pirani, I. Robinson and A. Trautman, who found exact solutions describing plane waves [31], and waves radiated from bounded sources [32].…”

Section: The Sticky Bead Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…6 we give an overview of the parts of [10] dealing with relativistic gravity, also comparing the treatment given here with that given in [6]. In particular, we describe the treatment of gravity sketched by Feynman in [10] and [13], along the lines of the description of electromagnetism given in [11,12]. Section 7 is devoted to the conclusions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A road map for Feynman's adventures in the land of gravitation

Di Mauro,

Esposito,

Naddeo

2021

Preprint

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Feynman's multifaceted contributions to gravitation, as can be inferred from several published and unpublished sources, are here reviewed. Feynman thought about this subject at least from late 1954 to the late '60s, giving several pivotal contributions to it, and as a byproduct, also to Yang-Mills theory. Even though he only published three papers on gravity, much more material is available, especially the records of his many interventions at the Chapel Hill conference in 1957, which are here analyzed in detail. In that conference, Feynman showed that he had already developed much of his picture of gravity, and in addition he expressed deep thoughts about fundamental issues in quantum mechanics, such as superpositions of the wave functions of macroscopic objects and the role of the observer, which were suggested by the problem of quantum gravity. Moreover, Feynman lectured on gravity several times. Besides the famous lectures given at Caltech in 1962-63, he extensively discussed this subject in a series of lectures given at the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1966-67, whose focus was astronomy and astrophysics. Here Feynman gave a somewhat simplified exposition with respect to the Caltech lectures, but with many original points. All this material allows to reconstruct a detailed picture of Feynman's ideas on gravity and of its evolution until the late sixties. The main points are that gravity, like electromagnetism, has a quantum foundation, so that classical general relativity has to be regarded as emerging from an underlying quantum theory in the classical limit, and that this quantum theory has to be investigated by computing physical processes, as if they were easily measurable. The same attitude is shown with respect to gravitational waves, as evident both from the Chapel Hill records and an unpublished letter written to V. Weisskopf. As a bonus, an original approach to gravity, which closely mimics (and probably was inspired by) the derivation of the Maxwell equations he gave in that period, is hinted at in the unpublished lectures.

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Section: Further Elaborationsupporting

confidence: 52%

Section: Introducing the Charactermentioning

confidence: 84%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%