I visited my brother a long time ago, when he was working on his Ph.D. in Physics. He tossed a small, innocuous-looking book to me and said, "Read this - its a complete brain-f**k. I've been hooked ever since. QED is, by far, the best piece of non-fiction I have ever read. It takes a long time for me to work though the concepts, and, as Feynman points out, nobody (including me) (especially me) truly understands Quantum Electrodynamics. But to begin with adding 'damned little arrows' and take that to an all-encompassing description of atomic theory, accurate to ten decimal places, in about 120 pages, so the likes of me can follow along, is the purest of genius. Bravo!

Rating 4.5
Feynman simplifies QED into four chapters based on his lectures. Two on the strange theory of light and two on the strange theory of matter. Short, simple, witty and informative. A good read !

I love how Feynman goes from "here are some wonderful arrows to solve all our problems" in the first three chapters to "here's the state of the rest of physics, and it's complicated" in the last. It seems that my luck on finding physics thrillers continues to hold.

Lágar 4 stjörnur. Fín bók, efnið þyrkingslegt á köflum. En samt sem áður fróðlegt.

Got to pick this up again. Every time I read it I see something new. A progressing student of physics very own, I Ching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec03o...

Feynman starts these lectures on quantum electrodynamics with the promise that one would not understand them. And he does keep his promise.

I was able to follow the first lecture. I think I got the gist of the second one. With the third lecture I was lost. Which is okay. It is a difficult subject and this is stuff for students of physics.

QED he keeps on saying is a great theory. But it does not explain what is really going on. It just (although just is not the right word here) provides the tools for predicting how light behaves. It is statistics.

I read the book in German, which was a mistake. Feynman is flippant but in German it sounds just stupid. For example when he talks about the idiocy of physicists. So they stopped creating new words from Greek but instead use words like up and down for quarks properties. Right, but what does that mean for the development of science? Does using metaphors like colors in this connection actually make a difference in how scientists visualise things, how they work?

Richard Feynman famously had an artist friend who took him, and all scientists, to task, for removing the beauty from nature by reducing things to mere physical processes and thereby making them dull. Feynmann thinks this is kind of nutty, viewing the complicated actions inside as having an intrinsic beauty all their own, arguing that scientific knowledge only adds to the excitement, mystery, and awe of nature. In QED, Feynman ably supports his thesis in a series of four lectures on quantum electrodynamics, or the interaction of light and electrons. Written for and delivered to a non-scientific audience, Feynman leads the thoughtful reader on a tour of how light works. Starting with the introduction, we learn about reflection and refraction, then in the next lecture we move on to why light reflects and refracts. Chapter three is about electrons and their interactions (electrons and photons behave identically, so by studying electrons we can understand photons, which are particles of light) including the famous two-hole experiment, which counterintuitively shows that light can be either a particle or a wave, depending on what observation you make with it. The book ends with an exploration of subatomic particles and their interactions with each other-quarks, gluons, particle spin, etc- for me personally, the most interesting chapter in a very interesting book.
Read this book, think about the concepts explained, and see if you don't start to find excitement, mystery, and awe in something as simple as turning on a light switch. The beauty is in the details.

Late to the party but this book, or rather, Feynman revived a flagging and absent interest in physics. The book itself is a transcripted version of a series of lectures Feynman gave at various places and I watched those along as I read this, often re-reading many passages because - and, there's no other way to say it, as a layman - it is truly mind-bending stuff.

What began as a way to understand why light behaves the way it does (read: double-slit experiment), it led physics and its forerunners on a rabbit hole of increasing wierdness involving tinier and tinier particles to help "complete" the theory behind it. Feynman is one among the many of the stalwarts who advanced our understanding of quantum mechanics but easily, he's the most accessible, the most passionate and someone with a deep desire to share his ideas with others. This is unmissable if you watch any of his videos and I thank him for taking me down this wondrous journey. We don't have the answers yet but just wondering about the questions itself is as close to divinity as a scientist can get.

When I first heard of the two recent quantum physics mega-events--the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle and the confirmation of the Inflation theory--I knew that these were events of massive import but I was woefully ill-equipped to understand the "why" of it. What began as a wikipedia binge of particle physics terms and definitions, became an attempt to understand the four fundamental forces, which then led me to Richard Feynman's QED. This book attempts to explain to the layperson one of the fundamental forces of nature--electromagnetism--and to give us a glimpse into the ways that light and matter interact to give rise to a host of derivative (in the non-science/math sense of the term) phenomena like optics, heat transfer, electricity, magnetism, etc.

While the book doesn't have the ability to make theoretical physicists out of us all, it does help the reader see the outline of the bigger picture (or should I say the infinitesimally tiny picture). I think one of Feynman's biggest successes as a translator come through his ability to 1) find the right metaphors, and 2) state clearly which ideas he is simplifying and which ones he is ignoring in order to make the material digestible. Feynman's tone is humorous and his language pithy. The diagrams used to illustrate concepts are extremely helpful. I, for one, am very glad to have gotten a glimpse into this fundamental concept that governs the world that we live in through this well-presented and fun book.

For those of you only interested in my view on the book, you can stop reading here. From this point on, I digress a little.

I have often heard people brandish the line "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." The origin of this line can be traced back to Alexander Pope's poem, "Essay on Criticism," and is often spouted to support the proposition that one must abstain from learning unless they mean to go all the way. However, I have always found this to be an incredibly superficial (totally ironic, I know) reading of the line given the context in which it appears. The poem states:

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring (spring of inspiration and knowledge - from Greek mythology):
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again."

Within this context, it's clear that Pope isn't trying to tell us that spotting the tip of an iceberg itself is dangerous, but that spotting the tip without realizing that there is more to the iceberg than its tip is what is dangerous. I strongly believe that as long as a person is aware of how incomplete or superficial his/her learning is, s/he can steer clear of said "danger". It is not only OK, but recommended that we try to broaden the scope of our intellectual pursuits even if we do not have the necessary resources to deepen them. And this book perfectly furthers that goal.

As a product of its time, I'd rate this a terrific effort. And, of course, it's always a delight to spend time in the company of Richard Feynman, even if only as a reader. Judged against the many exceptional popular science books that have been published since, however, this one suffers in comparison. The subject matter is fascinating, the explication only so successful. The book is well worth reading, though, a) because its author was such a talented scientist and such a cool dude, b) because the author was himself a major contributor to the branch of physics it describes, and c) because the tack he takes is an unusual one for popular science treatments (and quite interesting).

Along with Steven Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes", this is the best popular physics book I have ever read. It's not easy going (neither is Weinberg) but a dedicated reader can come away with a reasonable understanding of quantum electrodynamics. Of course, all the math is missing, and that is the true language of physics, so a complete understanding of QED requires an understanding of the mathematics, but this is as good as you can get without the math. Even though I'm a physicist (but I don't specialize in QED) I will need to read this a second time to really follow all that he's explaining.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“You will discover that in order to make any reasonable predictions with this new scheme of quantum electrodynamics, you would have to make an awful lot of little arrows on a piece of paper. It takes seven years - four undergraduate and three graduate - to train our physics students to do that in a tricky, efficient way.”

“I can guarantee you that every phenomenon about light that has been observed in detail can be explained by the theory of quantum electrodynamics.”

un libro super ligero hasta el momento en el que el feynman se vuelve loco con flechitas. De todas formas me sigue flipando la luz (que no se vaya la luz)