> quantum mechanics, including qed, falls squarely within the paradigm maxwell pioneered Does it, though? Sure, QED is a field theory, but it's perturbative wh

> quantum mechanics, including qed, falls squarely within the paradigm maxwell pioneered Does it, though? Sure, QED is a field theory, but it's perturbative where classical EM is exact, its fields are operator-valued distributions where classical fields are number-valued functions, its interactions are transition probabilities rather than forces - it's not clear to me that these are smaller jumps than introducing fields in the first place.