FEYNMAN, RICHARD P. | QED. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING, PRESENTATION COPY. 1985

The Property of Christopher Sykes

FEYNMAN, RICHARD P.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985

Octavo. 158 pp., with 93 numbered figures in text, including Feynman diagrams. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING (laid endpapers; spine lettered in violet; advert for Peierls Bird of passage on dust-jacket, lower flap). Publisher's black cloth, all edges trimmed and plain. In the original color-pictorial dust-jacket priced $18.50. Small crease and chip to upper panel of jacket, mild crease to front free end-paper, else fine. INSCRIBED AND SIGNED ON HALF-TITLE "TO CHRISTOPHER SYKES/ RICHARD FEYNMAN".

FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING, PRESENTATION COPY FROM FEYNMAN TO HIS LONGTIME DOCUMENTARIAN. FEYNMAN'S LAST BOOK; A VIVID EXPOSITION OF QUANTUM ELECTRODYNAMICS BY ITS GREATEST MASTER. This was THE HEART OF FEYNMAN’S WORK, and precisely the field in which he’d won his Nobel Prize — that is, for his “fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing conse-quences for the physics of elementary particles”. Distilled from a series of lectures at UCLA in 1983, this book was Feynman’s only non-technical account of the subject: Gleick calls it a model of science writing.

PROVENANCE:

Christopher Sykes (b. 1945), Feynman’s longtime documentarian (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out 1981, No Ordinary Genius 1993, etc), from the author as above. See eg M. Feynman “Fun to imagine”, TEDxCaltech 2011