The Dyson-Feynman conjectures (Q351531)

Few tools have meant more to theoretical physicists during the past half century than Feynman diagrams. It started in 1949 with what Feynman called a space-time approach to quantum electrodynamics and reached its culmination peak in 1965 when he together with Hibbs wrote a book on path integrals. This led him to consider histories, i.e. path in space-time as the primary objects of physical concern. Feynman also developed his time-ordered operator calculus. He formulated a conjecture claiming that this calculus in fact includes the path integrals. The great achievement of Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga was to develop perturbative techniques for the S-matrix. However, compared to the Schwinger-Tomonaga approach Feynman's view was so different that for a long time it was not clear how to obtain a unified approach. Finally, Freeman Dyson realized that the approaches of Schwinger and Feynman were equivalent. During the course of his analysis, he also formulated certain conjectures 1972 on occasion of an AMS meeting. In the present article, Gill and Zachary present a survey over recent work on this topic and offer their own view on Feynman's and Dyson's conjectures. Actually, some of these conjectures have been treated and solved by Salam and Weinberg.