![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() At higher orders in the series infinities emerged, making such computations meaningless and casting serious doubts on the internal consistency of the theory itself. However, further studies by Felix Bloch with Arnold Nordsieck, and Victor Weisskopf, in 19, revealed that such computations were reliable only at a first order of perturbation theory, a problem already pointed out by Robert Oppenheimer. ![]() In the following years, with contributions from Wolfgang Pauli, Eugene Wigner, Pascual Jordan, Werner Heisenberg and an elegant formulation of quantum electrodynamics by Enrico Fermi, physicists came to believe that, in principle, it would be possible to perform any computation for any physical process involving photons and charged particles. ĭirac described the quantization of the electromagnetic field as an ensemble of harmonic oscillators with the introduction of the concept of creation and annihilation operators of particles. The first formulation of a quantum theory describing radiation and matter interaction is attributed to British scientist Paul Dirac, who (during the 1920s) was able to compute the coefficient of spontaneous emission of an atom. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |