Julian Schwinger was already the world's leading nuclear theorist when he joined the Radiation Laboratory at MIT in 1943, at the ripe age of 25. Just 2 years earlier he had joined the faculty at Purdue, after a postdoc with OppenheimerinBerkeley, andgraduatestudyatColumbia. Anearlysemester at Wisconsin had con?rmed his penchant to work at night, so as not to have to interact with Breit and Wigner there. He was to perfect his iconoclastic 1 habits in his more than 2 years at the Rad Lab. Despite its deliberately misleading name, the Rad Lab was not involved in nuclear physics, which was imagined then by the educated public as a esoteric science without possible military application. Rather, the subject at hand was the perfection of radar, the beaming and re?ection of microwaves which had already saved Britain from the German onslaught. Here was a technology which won the war, rather than one that prematurely ended it, at a still incalculable cost. It was partly for that reason that Schwinger joined this e?ort, rather than what might have appeared to be the more natural project for his awesome talents, the development of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos. He had got a bit of a taste of that at the "Metallurgical Laboratory" in Chicago, and did not much like it. Perhaps more important for his decision to go to and stay at MIT during the war was its less regimented and isolated environment.

The lecture notes of Julian Schwinger's UCLA course consist of three parts corresponding to the three quarters of teaching. The first part begins with an analysis of Stern--Gerlach-type experiments which accomplishes a self-contained physical and mathematical development of the general structure of quantum kinematics. The second part proceeds from there. The response to infinitesimal time displacements yields the equations of motion. Then the Quantum Action Principle (QAP) is derived, and accepted as a fundamental principle. In a sense, the rest of part two and all of part three consist of instructive applications of the QAP.

An extension of Dr. Schwinger's two previous classic works, this volume contains four sections in addition to the previous sections of Electrodynamics II, which were concerned with the two-particle problem, and applications to hydrogenic atoms, positronium, and muonium.

This classic book (volume two of three volumes) is almost exclusively concerned with quantum electrodynamics. As such, it is retrospective in its subject matter. The topics discussed range from anomalous magnetic moments and vacuum polarization, in a variety of applications, to the energy level displacements in hydrogenic atoms, with occasional excursions into nuclear and high-energy physics. Based as it is upon the conceptually and computationally simple foundations of source theory, little in the way of formal mathematical apparatus is required, and thus most of the book is devoted to the working out of physical problems.

This classic, the first of three volumes, presents techniques that emphasize the unity of high-energy particle physics with electrodynamics, gravitational theory, and many-particle cooperative phenomena. What emerges is a theory intermediate in position between operator field theory and S-matrix theory, which rejects the dogmas of each and gains thereby a calculational ease and intuitiveness that make it a worthy contender to displace the earlier formulations.

A classic from 1969, this book is based on a series of lectures delivered at the Les Houches Summer School of Theoretical Physics in 1955. The book outlines a general scheme of quantum kinematics and dynamics.

A classic from 1969, this book is based on a series of lectures delivered at the Les Houches Summer School of Theoretical Physics in 1955. The book outlines a general scheme of quantum kinematics and dynamics.

Julian Schwinger had plans to write a textbook on quantum mechanics since the 1950s when he was teaching the subject at Harvard University regularly. * t Roger Newton remembers: A] group of us (Stanley Deser, Dick Arnowitt, Chuck Zemach, Paul Martin and I forgot who else) wrote up lecture notes on his Quantum Mechanics course but he never wanted them published because he "had not yet found the perfect way to do quantum mechanics. " The only text of those days that got published eventually - following a sug gestion by, and with the help of, Robert Kohler: : - were the notes to the lectures that Schwinger presented at Les Houches in 1955. The book was reissued in 1991, with this Special Preface by Schwinger 3]: The first two chapters of this book are devoted to Quantum Kine matics. In 1985 I had the opportunity to review that development in connection with the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Hermann Weyl's birthday. . . . ] In presenting my lecture 4] I felt the need to alter only one thing: the notation. Lest one think this rather triv ial, recall that the ultimate abandonment, early in the 19th century, of Newton's method of fluxions in favor of the Leibnizian calculus, stemmed from the greater flexibility of the latter's notation."

Julian Schwinger was already the world's leading nuclear theorist when he joined the Radiation Laboratory at MIT in 1943, at the ripe age of 25. Just 2 years earlier he had joined the faculty at Purdue, after a postdoc with OppenheimerinBerkeley, andgraduatestudyatColumbia. Anearlysemester at Wisconsin had con?rmed his penchant to work at night, so as not to have to interact with Breit and Wigner there. He was to perfect his iconoclastic 1 habits in his more than 2 years at the Rad Lab. Despite its deliberately misleading name, the Rad Lab was not involved in nuclear physics, which was imagined then by the educated public as a esoteric science without possible military application. Rather, the subject at hand was the perfection of radar, the beaming and re?ection of microwaves which had already saved Britain from the German onslaught. Here was a technology which won the war, rather than one that prematurely ended it, at a still incalculable cost. It was partly for that reason that Schwinger joined this e?ort, rather than what might have appeared to be the more natural project for his awesome talents, the development of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos. He had got a bit of a taste of that at the "Metallurgical Laboratory" in Chicago, and did not much like it. Perhaps more important for his decision to go to and stay at MIT during the war was its less regimented and isolated environment.

This volume contains four sections in addition to the previous sections of electrodynamics II, which were concerned with the two-particle problem, and applications to hydrogenic atoms, positronium, and muonium. Although the major objective here is an improved treatment of the electron magnetic moment, attention is also given to the effect of string magnetic fields, to an extended treatment of photon propagation function, and to a confrontational discussion on the pion decay into two photons.

This classic book (volume two of three volumes) is almost exclusively concerned with quantum electrodynamics. As such, it is retrospective in its subject matter. The topics discussed range from anomalous magnetic moments and vacuum polarization, in a variety of applications, to the energy level displacements in hydrogenic atoms, with occasional excursions into nuclear and high-energy physics. Based as it is upon the conceptually and computationally simple foundations of source theory, little in the way of formal mathematical apparatus is required, and thus most of the book is devoted to the working out of physical problems.

In first volume the author realised how the phenomenological source concept could be freed from its operator substructure and used as the basis for a completely independent development, with much closer ties to experiment. What emerges is a theory intermediate in position between operator field theory and S-matrix theory, which rejects the dogmas of each and gains thereby a calculational ease and intuitiveness that make it a worthy contender to displace the earlier formulations.

How quantum electrodynamics evolved in the first quarter of the 20th century, revealed here by its creators in 34 papers by Foley, Fermi, Heisenberg, Dryson, Weisskopf, Oppenheimer, Pauli, Schwinger, Klein and other key figures. 29 are in English, three in German, one each in French and Italian. Preface. Historical commentary.