Sidney Coleman (1937-2007) earned his doctorate at Caltech under Murray Gell-Mann. Before completing his thesis, he was hired by Harvard and remained there his entire career. A celebrated particle theorist, he is perhaps best known for his brilliant lectures, given at Harvard and in a series of summer school courses at Erice, Sicily. Three times in the 1960s he taught a graduate course on Special and General Relativity; this book is based on lecture notes taken by three of his students and compiled by the Editors.

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 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 better motivated than Feynman, and getting to the point faster than Schwinger".This edition has been printed on the 60th anniversary of the Cornell lectures, and includes a foreword by science historian David Kaiser, as well as notes from Dyson's lectures at the Les Houches Summer School of Theoretical Physics in 1954. The Les Houches lectures, described as a supplement to the original Cornell notes, provide a more detailed look at field theory, a careful and rigorous derivation of Fermi's Golden Rule, and a masterful treatment of renormalization and Ward's Identity.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.

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 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 better motivated than Feynman, and getting to the point faster than Schwinger".This edition has been printed on the 60th anniversary of the Cornell lectures, and includes a foreword by science historian David Kaiser, as well as notes from Dyson's lectures at the Les Houches Summer School of Theoretical Physics in 1954. The Les Houches lectures, described as a supplement to the original Cornell notes, provide a more detailed look at field theory, a careful and rigorous derivation of Fermi's Golden Rule, and a masterful treatment of renormalization and Ward's Identity.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.