Remarks on an Article by R.P. Feynman

Daniel Parrochia

One usually refers the concept of Feynman path integral to the work of Norbert Wiener on Brownian motion in the early 1920s. This view is not false and we show in this article that Wiener used the first path integral of the history of physics to describe the Brownian motion. That said, Wiener, as he pointed out, was inspired by the work of some French mathematicians, particularly Gateaux and Levy. Moreover, although Richard Feynman has independently found this notion, we show that in the course of the 1930s, while searching a kind of geometrization of quantum mechanics, another French mathematician, Adolphe Buhl, noticed by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, had himself been close to forge such a notion. This reminder does not detract from the remarkable discovery of Feynman, which must undeniably be attributed to him. We also show, however, that the difficulties of this notion had to wait many years before being resolved, and it was only recently that the path integral could be rigorously established from a mathematical point of view.

F. Lacava

Qian Qian, Shang-Wu, Gu +1 more

This article shows that in Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect arrangements, the electron wave propagation spaceis doubly connected for two real coherent sources, and simply connected under certain condition for two virtual coherentsources, and all known AB experiments belong to the latter case. By the Feynman path integral method, we show thatin the former case there is no AB effect, whereas in the latter case there is.

Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano

QIANShang-Wu, GUZhi-Yu

This article shows that in Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect arrangements, the electron wave propagation space is doubly connected for two real coherent sources, and simply connected under certain condition for two virtual coherent sources, and all known AB experiments belong to the latter case. By the Feynman path integral method, we show that in the former case there is no AB effect, whereas in the latter case there is.