History and Philosophy of Feynman's Electrodynamics: From the Absorber Theory of Radiation to Feynman Diagrams

Abstract

The main objective of this dissertation is to reconstruct the philosophical intuition that led the physicist Richard Feynman to develop the absorber theory of radiation, the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and the Feynman diagrams. This intuition, in its most general form, corresponds to the idea that the dynamics of some quantum phenomena does not have to be studied by looking at the system’s infinitesimal time evolution from initial to final state. Rather, some phenomena are better accounted for if we consider the initial and final states and evaluate whatever happens in-between as happening all-at-once.