Richard Feynman Presents Quantum Electrodynamics for the NonScientist

In 1979, the charis­mat­ic physi­cist Richard Feyn­man jour­neyed to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Auck­land (New Zealand) and deliv­ered a series of four lec­tures on Quan­tum Elec­tro­dy­nam­ics (QED), the the­o­ry for which he won his Nobel Prize. It’s some heady mate­r­i­al, but Feyn­man made a point of mak­ing dif­fi­cult con­cepts intel­li­gi­ble to a crowd not nec­es­sar­i­ly trained in sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. If you’ve nev­er seen Feyn­man lec­ture before, then you won’t want to miss these lec­tures avail­able in four parts (find Part 1 above, and the remain­ing parts below), or his longer lec­ture series, The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law, deliv­ered at Cor­nell in 1964. (Find it here, or in the Physics sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.)

As for the Auck­lund lec­tures on QED, they lat­er became the basis for Feyn­man’s pop­u­lar 1988 book, QED: The Strange The­o­ry of Light and Mat­ter. 

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Relat­ed Con­tent

Richard Feyn­man: The Like­li­hood of Fly­ing Saucers

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