- Why did the measured magnetic moment of the proton come out nearly three times higher than the simple Dirac prediction?
Quantum Electrodynamics
The quantum field theory of light and charged matter.
- What discrepancy did Willis Lamb find between Dirac's equation and the measured energy levels of hydrogen?
- What wartime radar technology let Lamb make microwave measurements precise enough to catch the Lamb shift?
- How did Lamb and Kusch's small experimental anomalies lead to the development of quantum electrodynamics?
- What question did Feynman ask about whether physical laws prevent building machines at the molecular or atomic scale?
- What cash prizes did Feynman offer for miniaturization challenges, and were they ever claimed?
- Why is Feynman's 1959 lecture considered the founding document of nanotechnology even though it proposed no specific technique?
- What contradiction in gauge theory made it necessary to explain how the W and Z bosons could have mass?
- Why had quantum electrodynamics been producing infinite, unusable answers before renormalization fixed it?
- How precisely do QED's predictions match experimental measurement, and what does that precision actually mean in physical terms?
- What are Feynman diagrams, and why did they make QED calculations easier for other physicists to use?
- How did Freeman Dyson show that Tomonaga's, Schwinger's, and Feynman's independently developed approaches were equivalent?
- What does it mean for fluctuations to occur 'at every scale of length simultaneously,' and why did that break the standard tools of physics?
- How did Wilson's renormalization group get adopted outside condensed matter physics, into quantum field theory?
- How did Richard Feynman demonstrate the O-ring's brittleness to the Rogers Commission using a glass of ice water?
- What are Feynman diagrams, and why did they make quantum electrodynamics calculations practical?
- What made the electroweak theory's calculations produce unusable infinities before 1971?
- How did 't Hooft's renormalisability proof turn the Standard Model into a mathematically trustworthy structure?
- Why does the mass of the Higgs boson trace back to work done in Utrecht in the early 1970s?
- What earlier physicist tried and failed to solve the spaghetti-breaking problem?
- What did Freeman Dyson's 1949 paper prove about the three competing formulations of quantum electrodynamics?
- Why was Dyson's contribution described as synthesis rather than original discovery?
- What did Gerardus 't Hooft's 1970s proof that the Standard Model is renormalisable make possible?
- What later contributions did Yang make to gauge field theory, and how do they underlie the Standard Model?
- What is the muon's magnetic moment (g-2), and why do virtual particles alter it?