Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

Quantum mechanics was triumphing not because a few leading theorists found it mathematically convincing, but because hundreds of materials scientists found that it worked.

Not all computational devices have analogues in the word pictures that scientists use to describe reality, but Feynman’s discovery did. It corresponded to a theorem that was easy to state and almost as easy to visualize: The force on an atom’s nucleus is no more or less than the electrical force from the surrounding field of charged electrons—the electrostatic force. Once the distribution of charge has been calculated quantum mechanically, then from that point forward quantum mechanics disappears from the picture. The problem becomes classical; the nuclei can be treated as static points of mass and charge.