Matt McIrvin on Nostr: I don't know much about it but I'm pretty sure Feynman came up with the path integral ...

I don't know much about it but I'm pretty sure Feynman came up with the path integral in that context, so it had an incredibly far-reaching consequence.

(Though Feynman himself pointed out that the basic idea came from Paul Dirac, tossed out as a passage in a textbook--Dirac just never publicly developed it very quantitatively.)

I'm fascinated by these "close but no cigar" theories that often have some simplifying or illuminating characteristics compared to the one that eventually became dominant. The Bohr-Sommerfeld quantum theory that we were discussing several years ago in another social-media universe is another one.