"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

There was this problem: When you shake an electron, it radiates energy,
and so there's a loss. That means there must be a force on it. And there
must be a different force when it's charged than when it's not charged. (If
the force were exactly the same when it was charged and not charged, in one
case it would lose energy, and in the other it wouldn't. You can't have two
different answers to the same problem.)
The standard theory was that it was the electron acting on itself that
made that force (called the force of radiation reaction), and I had only
electrons acting on other electrons. So I was in some difficulty, I
realized, by that time. (When I was at MIT, I got the idea without noticing
the problem, but by the time I got to Princeton, I knew that problem.)
What I thought was: I'll shake this electron. It will make some nearby
electron shake, and the effect back from the nearby electron would be the
origin of the force of radiation reaction. So I did some calculations and
took them to Wheeler.
Wheeler, right away, said, "Well, that isn't right because it varies
inversely as the square of the distance of the other electrons, whereas it
should not depend on any of these variables at all. It'll also depend
inversely upon the mass of the other electron; it'll be proportional to the
charge on the other electron."
What bothered me was, I thought he must have done the calculation. I
only realized later that a man like Wheeler could immediately see all that
stuff when you give him the problem. I had to calculate, but he could see.
Then he said, "And it'll be delayed - the wave returns late - so all
you've described is reflected light."
"Oh! Of course," I said.
"But wait," he said. "Let's suppose it returns by advanced waves -
reactions backward in time - so it comes back at the right time. We saw the
effect varied inversely as the square of the distance, but suppose there are
a lot of electrons, all over space: the number is proportional to the square
of the distance. So maybe we can make it all compensate."
We found out we could do that. It came out very nicely, and fit very
well. It was a classical theory that could be right, even though it differed
from Maxwell's standard, or Lorentz's standard theory. It didn't have any
trouble with the infinity of self-action, and it was ingenious. It had
actions and delays, forwards and backwards in time - we called it
"half-advanced and half-retarded potentials."
Wheeler and I thought the next problem was to turn to the quantum
theory of electrodynamics, which had difficulties (I thought) with the
self-action of the electron. We figured if we could get rid of the
difficulty first in classical physics, and then make a quantum theory out of
that, we could straighten out the quantum theory as well.
Now that we had got the classical theory right, Wheeler said, "Feynman,
you're a young fella - you should give a seminar on this. You need
experience in giving talks. Meanwhile, I'll work out the quantum theory part
and give a seminar on that later."
So it was to be my first technical talk, and Wheeler made arrangements
with Eugene Wigner to put it on the regular seminar schedule.
A day or two before the talk I saw Wigner in the hall. "Feynman," he
said, "I think that work you're doing with Wheeler is very interesting, so