ABSTRACT
Lightning arouses a sense of the primordial, enlivening questions of origin and materialization. It conjures haunting cultural images of the summoning of life through its energizing effects, perhaps most memorable in the classic films Der Golem and Frankenstein. Bioelectricity was in the air, sparking the imagination of nineteenth-century scientists. As Cynthia Graber reports, “Many efforts, including using electricity to treat hysteria and melancholia, amounted to little more than quackery.” Quantum field theory was invented in the 1920s, shortly after the development of (nonrelativistic single-particle) quantum mechanics. It is a theory that combines insights from the classical theory of electromagnetic fields (mid-nineteenth century), special relativity, and quantum mechanics. Quantum physics enters into QFT most prominently in terms of the discretization of physical observables (quantizing or making discrete physical quantities that classical physics assumed were continuous). The topological dynamic reverberates with QFT processes, much like the one that perverse kinds of self-touching/self-re-creating electrons enact.
