He pointed out a remarkable irony of the story. So many of the ideas he nursed on his way to his Nobel Prize–winning work had themselves proved faulty: his first notion that a charge should not act on itself; the whole Wheeler-Feynman half-advanced, half-retarded electrodynamics. Even his path integrals and his view of electrons moving backward in time were only aids to guessing, not essential parts of the theory, he said. The method used here, of reasoning in physical terms, therefore, appears to be extremely inefficient. On looking back over the work, I can only feel a kind of regret for the
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