At the 1948 Pocono Conference, what title did Feynman give his QED presentation?

At the 1948 Pocono Conference, Feynman titled his QED presentation “Alternative Formulation of Quantum Electrodynamics.”

The conference took place from March 30 to April 2, 1948, at Pocono Manor Inn in Pennsylvania. Feynman presented his unconventional approach to quantum electrodynamics after Julian Schwinger had discussed his own developments. Feynman’s presentation introduced his diagrammatic method, now known as Feynman diagrams, but the audience initially found it difficult to follow.

The title matters because Feynman was offering a different formulation of QED, not merely presenting a general theory of quantum mechanics or a paper specifically about positrons. His approach used spacetime ideas and graphical bookkeeping to calculate interactions between particles and fields.

The meeting was historically important even though the presentation was not immediately understood. Feynman later published the work, while Freeman Dyson helped show that Feynman’s formulation was equivalent to the approaches of Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga. The three shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.