Ned wrote:
Note: talking about QED. And I'm just being a pedant here.
This was developed orginally by R. Feynmann.
Among others. Feynman's great rival, Julian Schwinger, and Sin-Itro Tomanaga shared the 1965 Nobel for their work on QED.
Schwinger used a fairly complicated form of calc to get his answers (complicated because some of the infinities wouldn't go away if you did it the normal way) and Feynman created his Feynman Diagrams to get his identical answers in a graphical, easier to understand format. Tomonaga made his first breathrough in what became QED in 1942, but it didn't get much attention because the world was rather distracted at the time. He handled a slightly different part of QED theory (though I'm too ignorant to understand the distinction between his part and the part that Feynman and Schwinger did).
Feynman was a showman who wrote a couple of popular non-science books for lay-people, Schwinger was a fairly reclusive academic who bored his own graduate students.
This all came from a biography of Feynman (Genius by Gleick) so it's somewhat more pro-Feynman than I would like, but as all three were dead before I was 12 I obviously would have no first-hand knowledge of their personalities.
Chris
This message has been edited by cmanteuf, 03-31-2005 03:45 PM
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