(actually, sit corrected, as I'm at a computer terminal at the moment.)
| > It was Wheeler that came up with the idea;
|
| I doubt it.
|
But consider the following,
. . in the fall of 1940, Feynman received a telephone call from John
Wheeler [Feynman's thesis
advisor] at the Graduate College in Princeton, in which he [Wheeler]
said that he knew why all
electrons have the same charge and the same mass. "Why?" asked Feynman,
and Wheeler replied,
"Because they are all one and the same electron." [NOTE: Wheeler is
saying that this single electron
moves on many paths forward in time as an electron, each path snaking
BACKWARD in time as a
positron-see QED page 99. The multiple paths forward in time of this
single electron represent all
electrons. Hence there is only one electron in the universe-a perfect
example of Wheeler's courage as
a physicist!]. . . "But, Professor, there aren't as many positrons as
electrons," and Wheeler replied,
"Well, maybe they are hidden in the protons or something."
-- Jagdish Mehra
And perhaps more interestingly from Feynman himself, in his Nobel
Lecture in Sweden in 1965
"As a by-product of this same view, I received a telephone call one day
at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he
said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the
same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then
he explained on the telephone, "suppose that the world lines which we
were ordinarily considering before in time and space - instead of only
going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through
the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many,
many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one
thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the
section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future
we have the wrong sign to the proper time - to the proper four
velocities - and that's equivalent to changing the sign of the charge,
and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron." "But,
Professor", I said, "there aren't as many positrons as electrons."
"Well, maybe they are hidden in the protons or something", he said. I
did not take the idea that all the electrons were the same one from him
as seriously as I took the observation that positrons could simply be
represented as electrons going from the future to the past in a back
section of their world lines. That, I stole!" - Richard P. Feynman -
Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965"
| FWIW, once upon a time I talked to Feynman about this idea.
| He told me "that was Feynman's idea". (No, that is not a
| paraphrase, and yes, he referred to himself in the third person.)
Actually, its worth quite a lot. My knowledge only comes from stories
in popularizations that are in print, combined with my own faulty
memory. I never have met the man himself (Feynman) nor seen him in
public. So your statement constitutes eye-witness testimony; always of
worth in a discussion about accuracy of historical accounts.
John, can you further elucidate, as it certainly is in the popular
literature that it is Wheeler's idea; even some of that literature
coming from Feynman himself. (I view a Nobel lecture as part of the
popular literature)