Renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson is famous for his work in quantum mechanics, nuclear weapons policy and bold visions for the future of humanity. In the 1940s, he was responsible for demonstrating the equivalence of the two formulations of quantum electrodynamics — Richard Feynman's diagrammatic path integral formulation and the variational methods developed by Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonoga — showing the mathematical consistency of QED.

This invaluable volume comprises the legendary, never-before-published, lectures on quantum electrodynamics first given by Dyson at Cornell University in 1951. The late theorist Edwin Thompson Jaynes once remarked "For a generation of physicists they were the happy medium: clearer and motivated than Feynman, and getting to the point faster than Schwinger”.

Future generations of physicists are bound to read these lectures with pleasure, benefiting from the lucid style that is so characteristic of Dyson's exposition.

Contents:

• The Dirac Theory
• Scattering Problems and Born Approximation
• Field Theory
• Examples of Quantized Field Theories
• Free Particle Scattering Problems
• General Theory of Free Particle Scattering
• Scattering by a Static Potential. Comparison with Experimental Results

“… one can profit significantly from the insight into the physics beneath the apparatus, and the extensive and detailed treatment of some problems. Therefore it may be very useful as an additional source in the preparation of a course on quantum field theory … I highly recommend this book to get a different view on quantum field theory, and also to understand how quantum field theory emerged in its present form at all.”

“The fame of these lectures as well as of this author, together with the enduring interest in their contents attested by this transcription, obviously classify the book as of great interest to students and researchers willing to hear a presentation of quantum electrodynamics from one of the founding fathers.”