Uber die Selbstenergie des Elektrons. - [FIRST INDICATION OF QED]

1934. Berlin, Springer, 1934. 8vo. Bound in contemporary half cloth with gilt lettering, In "Zeitschrift für Physik", Band 89, 1934. Entire issue offered. Two stamps to title page, otherwise fine. Pp. 27-39. [Entire volume : VIII, 836 pp.]. First appearance of Weisskopf seminal paper in which he for the very first time gave an indication that QED (Quantum electro dynamics) might be made a tractable theory."At Pauli's suggestion [Weisskopf] computed the electron's self-energy in perturbation theory, including both electrons and positrons. In doing this calculation [Weisskopf] made a sign error, which was quickly pointed out by Wendell Furry; when this was taken into account, the result was a self-energy that diverged logarithmically as the electron's radius a tended to zero (1934). This was an astonishing result: Classical electrodynamics was long known to produce a linear divergence, and the one-particle version of QED, already mentioned, yielded a quadratically divergent self-energy. The "soft" logarithmic divergence of QED with electrons and positrons was a first indication that QED might be made a tractable theory" (Jackson, Victor Frederick Weisskopf).Later Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonago shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics [QED], with deep ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particels".