Dirac's quantum electrodynamics (Q4801229)

Dirac's contribution to quantum electrodynamics during the years 1926 to 1933 is examined paying attention to the importance and the specificity of his approach and also tracing the roots of his dissatisfaction with the theory. In 1932 Dirac found a new approach to the whole theory, but his corresponding paper, however, was only a sketch of a possible theory. In two month after this publication Fock and Podolsky in Russia coauthored two papers on the further development of Dirac's new theory. The whole history of creating the Dirac-Fock-Podolsky theory is described in the present paper. The disovery of the positron changed in 1933 the relationship between the theory of quantum electrodynamics and experiment and strengthened the credibility of the Dirac theory. In a report presented in 1933 at the conference in Leningrad and congress in Brussels Dirac put forward the idea of vacuum polarization. Nevertheless he remained skeptical of renormalization and his disappointment with quantum electrodynamics, which started in the early thirties, never totally disappeared. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1005.00010].