Feynman and Hibbs

This World Wide Web page written by Dan Styer, Oberlin College Physics Department;
http://www.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/FeynmanHibbs/index.html;
last updated 19 December 2006.

Reading these documents requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software.

Richard P. Feynman and Albert R. Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965).

This famous book is full of extraordinary insight and excruciating errors. Here is a list of 879 errors.

Here are explications of several difficult points:

• Diffraction through a sharp-edged slit: Section 3-3
• Kernel for charged particle in magnetic field: Problem 3-10
• Kernel for the forced harmonic oscillator: Problem 3-11
• Scattering wave function: Problem 6-13
• Harmonic oscillator amplitudes: Problem 8-1
• The forced harmonic oscillator: Section 8-9
• Eliminating field variables: Equation (9-63)
• Microscopic expression for heat: Equation (10-19)

Here is a spreadsheet to calculate and plot the sharp-edged slit diffraction results of figure 3-6. To use it you will need Microsoft Excel and the XNUMBERS free open-source add-in package.