"Our stability is but balance" — Freeman Dyson on how to imagine quantum fields (via Gravity and Levity)

My introduction to QFT was incidentally very similar to http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/so-is-the-universe-made-of-tiny-springs-or-isnt-it/.

In the last post I told the story of my own struggles with quantum field theory and what it is supposed to mean.  In this post (as promised), I want to let someone much more intelligent and eloquent tell the story of quantum fields. The following are excerpts from Freeman Dyson’s beautiful essay “Field Theory”, written in 1953, as presented in his book From Eros to Gaia.  I have tried to copy the most essential and visual arguments from the essay … Read More

via Gravity and Levity