Abstract
Any physical theory which seriously proposes that events in the future may be the efficient causes of events in the past certainly may be regarded—at least at first glance—as a rather revolutionary doctrine. In a recent issue of the Reviews of Modern Physics (Vol. 17, Nos. 2 & 3, p. 157) commemorating Niels Bohr's sixtieth birthday, and under the editorship of the latest Nobel Prize winner in physics, W. Pauli, there appeared such a theory—written by Bohr's former student, J. A. Wheeler and Wheeler's associate (and former student) at Princeton, R. P. Feynman. The title of their paper appears harmless enough: “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation.” It is one part of a more comprehensive three-part paper intended for later publication as a general constructive critique of classical field theory (Maxwell's electrodynamics) and of the theory of action at a distance as propounded by Schwarzschild and Fokker. (In passing, we note that in this more general paper there is derived the Frenkel solution of the old problem of infinite self-energy of the point-charge electron.)
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