Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

by James Gleick

The new notion turned paradoxical as soon as it was expressed in words: Shake a charge here—then another charge shakes a little earlier. It explicitly required an action backward in time. Where was the cause and where was the effect? If Feynman ever felt that this was a deep thicket to enter merely for the sake of eliminating the electron’s self-action, he suppressed the thought. After all, self-action created an undeniable contradiction within quantum mechanics, and the entire profession was finding it insoluble. At any rate, in the era of Einstein and Bohr, what was one more paradox? Feynman already believed that it was the mark of a good physicist never to say, “Oh, whaddyamean, how could that be?” The