Julian Schwinger

But if you include this secondary interaction, you get g equals 2.0011614.

This correction was first calculated by American physicist Julian Schwinger in 1949.

It was an amazing result for the time, but a lot of time has passed since then, and physicists were not content to simply stop at this first correction.

See, there really are infinite ways the electron can interact with the EM field, with crazy networks of virtual particles and virtual matter-antimatter loops between the real ingoing and outgoing particles.

Over time, physicists have included more and more corrections, refining the prediction of the g factor to increasing precision.

For each new degree of precision, the number of Feynman diagrams needed explodes.

Schwinger did his 1949 calculation by hand.

Since 2008, all calculations are done on large supercomputing clusters.

A

Schwinger? Of course.

Yeah.

You like that, eh? I do.

And as QFT emerged, it became clear that there is a certain symmetry that's not just intuitively expected but also theoretically required.

Starting with Julian Schwinger's spin-statistics theorem in 1951, it became increasingly clear that quantum field theory demands symmetry under the combined action of charge conjugation, parity inversion, and time reversal.

The very axiomatic foundations of QFT state that an antimatter mirror-reflected time-reversed version of our uni-

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Physicists call it the quantum critical threshold, and crossing it changes everything about the way the universe works in the immediate vicinity of the object.

The quantum critical magnetic field strength, sometimes called the Schwinger limit for electrons, is approximately 4.4 times 10 to the 13 Gauss.

This is the field strength at which the energy associated with the magnetic interaction of an electron equals the electron's own rest mass energy.

Below this threshold, magnetic fields affect charged particles in familiar ways.

Yeah, I, I agree with your observation.

One of my favorite quotes is a quote from Julian Schwinger about-- And, you know, he was always calculationally extremely strong, one of the strongest maybe [chuckles] ever.

But he, at toward the end of his life, kept saying, "You have to keep your hand in it.

You have to keep your hand-