QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

A book on physics that is entertaining? Hard to believe, but during the reading of this book I not only got a grasp on some of the fundamental concepts of Quantum Electro Dynamics, but thoroughly enjoyed the way it was explained. Feynman is a master teacher. He has the ability to take complex concepts and boil them down so that even a physics dummy can understand them. It is obvious when reading the text how complete Feynman's understanding of the material is. You know how you can read a science book and not really get what the author is trying to explain? Sometimes that comes from your own lack of intelligence, but a lot of times it's because the author wasn't totally clear about what he was writing. In this book, you really get the underlying concepts becasue Feynman's understanding of the subject is so complete. I found myself absorbing some of the QED concepts almost by osmosis.The book is composed of 4 lectures Feynman gave at UCLA in the mid 80's. QED is about the interaction of light and matter. Feynman starts the explanation of QED by dealing with the partial reflection of light onto 2 surfaces of glass, and uses arrow diagrams to make the explanation easy to understand. He uses the arrow diagrams in the other lectures which continue the discussion of QED's attempt to explain the interaction of photons with matter. The last lecture deals with subatomic particles and QED's relationship to the rest of physics. The part of the book I enjoyed most was the 3rd lecture called "Electrons and Their Interactions" which explains how electrons go from point to point in space/time. He gets into the famous "Feynman Diagrams" showing how electrons and photons seem to travel backwards in time, and how photons can go faster or slower than the conventional speed of light. It's fascinating! What's great about these lectures is their clarity and humor. The author doesn't take himself too seriously and as a result the book is a delight to read, as well as being enlightening. Kudo's as well to the editor who distilled the material down to a manageable length of 152 pages.Can a book on Quantum Electro Dynamics be really fun to read? This one is.

Here's a book that shows, clearly, that explaining science to a lay audience is something altogether different from "popular science". This book will not teach you buzzwords and catchphrases with which to impress your next non-physicist audience. It will not help you wow the crowds with your knowledge of "philosophical" issues of science.What this book will do for you is give you a fascinating, lucid and yet elementary introduction to the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), as told by one of the Nobel laureates whose mind it sprang from. It amazes me how much ground Feynman managed to cover in just four lectures, without assuming ANY foreknowledge of higher mathematics or physics (not even complex numbers, which are central to QED). Every scientist who deems his work too esoteric to be digested by laymen should be made to read this. Everyone else: get this book and be prepared to learn some amazing and intuition-confounding facts about physics.[For the record: I'm a mathematician and computer scientist, not a physicist.]