Talk on Electrostatic and High-Energy Accelerators

FEYNMAN, Richard (1918-1988). Autograph manuscript signed, n.p., ca. May 1948. Together four pages, 280 x 215mm, with three pages bearing diagrams and calculations in black ink accomplished on the rectos and versos of a mimeograph of a his typescript presentation, "Final Announcement of Conference on Electrostatic and High-Energy Accelerators" and one page being a draft for a talk related to those diagrams, intended to be presented at the conference (slight edge chipping, one spot of inkstaining at one corner.) "[I] Would like to talk about what new Q.[uantum] Electr.[rodynamics] predicts...." A draft for an early conference talk at MIT, delivered a year before his landmark paper, "Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics," which ultimately led to his Nobel Prize in 1965. A terrific early artifact that opens a window onto Feynman’s thinking at a pivotal stage in the evolution of his work on quantum electrodynamics. He created these diagrams shortly after the celebrated Pocono Conference of March 1948, where Julian Schwinger’s rival formulation of QED dominated discussion, and likely before the cross-country journey Feynman took that June with Freeman Dyson, whose later work demonstrated the equivalence of the two approaches (Gleick, pp. 262-266). The sketches on the conference program trace the fundamental physical interactions that furnished some of the most important experimental tests of QED: the Compton effect, in which hard X-rays scatter inelastically from electrons; bremsstrahlung, or "braking radiation," emitted when rapidly decelerating electrons shed energy; and the creation of electron-positron pairs by high-energy gamma rays. At the time, Feynman taught theoretical physics at Cornell University and pushed forward the research that ultimately eared him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. The text opens; "[I] Would like to talk about what new Q.[uantum] Electr.[odynamics] predicts that might be looked for. Many problems have not yet been worked out. One is motion of electron in Coulomb field. First effect 13 volts. Accuracy vs. energy!... Typical high energy, Pairs, Bremsstrahlung, Compton effect, elect -elect. scatt..." No published version of this talk is known extant.

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