4 ms·
Feynman’s first paper (1939)
- agumonkey 10y agoEinstein's http://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstein-papers/1901_4_513-523.pdf http://myweb.rz.uni-augsburg.de/~eckern/adp/history/einstein...
- munchor 10y agoTranslated English version can be found here[0]. [0]: http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol2-trans/15?ajax http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol2-trans/15?ajax
- azuajef 10y agoApart from the historical value of this submission, imagine nowadays a scientific paper starting with "Imagine...". Thanks for sharing!
- dr_zoidberg 10y agoTo me it read more like a math text than a physics text, in which "let there be X...", "imagine Y...", and similar phrases, are usually found. Yet I agree, it seems the physics community has grown a slight alergy to that kind of writing, and it probably would be received with a bit of skpeticism/disdain nowadays.
- azuajef 10y agoAnd the same can be said about other communities, inc. computing and biology.
- jessriedel 10y agoHe's just using it as a synonym for "Consider..." or "Assume we have...", which is a really common way to start. I didn't find this paper to read very differently from a contemporary paper in Physical Review Letters, except that there's no introduction that gives context within the rest of the literature. Using the word "imagine" isn't that unusual. Here's some examples in just the past couples of years: "We might then imagine other starting points which..." "...let us now imagine that..." "Let us imagine a potential of the form..." https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2015&q=imagine&hl=en&as_publication=physical+review+letters&as_sdt=0,33 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2015&q=imagine&hl=...
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoNothing special about the "imagine" portion; plenty of research in theoretical Computer Science takes an even more informal.approach in the introduction.
- patricius 10y agoHow were formulae typeset back then?
- biofox 10y agoI might be wrong, but I believe they were handwritten in the submitted manuscripts then manually typeset by the publisher. In Feynman's PhD thesis, all of the formulae are written in: http://cds.cern.ch/record/101498/files/Thesis-1942-Feynman.pdf http://cds.cern.ch/record/101498/files/Thesis-1942-Feynman.p...
- prestonbriggs 10y agoTediously! See: http://ultrasparky.org/school/pdf/Rhatigan_Monotype_4-line_math.pdf http://ultrasparky.org/school/pdf/Rhatigan_Monotype_4-line_m... This thesis actually describes a scheme Monotype developed to replace the older hand-setting approach (used through WWII). Nice intro to the subject though. Preston