ISBN: | 978-5-5081-7650-1 |
High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory (also called the Wheeler–Feynman time-symmetric theory) is an interpretation of electrodynamics that starts from the idea that a solution to the electromagnetic field equations has to be symmetric with respect to time-inversion, as are the field equations themselves. The motivation for such choice is mainly due to the importance that time symmetry has in physics. Indeed, there is no apparent reason for which such symmetry should be broken, and therefore one time direction has no privilege to be more important than the other. Thus, a theory that respects this symmetry appears more elegant than theories with which one has to arbitrarily choose one time direction over the other as the preferred one. Another key idea reminiscent of Mach`s principle due to Tetrode is that elementary particles act on other elementary particles not themselves; this immediately removes the problem of self-energies. This theory is named after its originators, the late physicists Richard Feynman and John Archibald Wheeler.