“In this book Carver Mead offers a radically new approach to the standard problems of electromagnetic theory. Motivated by the belief that the goal of scientific research should be the simplification and unification of knowledge, he describes a new way of doing electrodynamics—collective electrodynamics—that does not rely on Maxwell’s equations, but rather uses the quantum nature of matter as i...

The usual action integral of classical electrodynamics is derived starting from Lanczos’s electrodynamics — a pure field theory in which charged particles are identified with singularities of the homogeneous Maxwell’s equations interpreted as a generalization of the Cauchy-Riemann regularity conditions from complex to biquaternion functions of four complex variables. It is shown that contrary t...

We show how to simulate a toy model of electrodynamics in 1+1 dimensions and describe several numerical experiments. The toy model is much simpler than ordinary electrodynamics, but shares many of the same physical features. For example, there are analogs to the electric and magnetic fields, and these fields generate forces between charged particles and support freely propagating radiation. Unl...

The second-order intensity correlation function of light transmitted out of a cavity QED system exhibits the nonclassical features and dynamics of the atom-field interaction. We present measurements of the intensity correlation to examine the size of the nonclassical features and the dependence on driving intensity, detuning, and the strength of the atom-field coupling. We use a model that take...