Science's "most beautiful theories"

[caraher]

12. I don't have my copy of QED handy right now...

but by way of introducing his subject, Feynman says something like this: With the exceptions of gravity and radioactive decay, "everyday" interactions between light and matter, and between atoms, are dominated by processes ultimately described by QED.

He does talk about the rest of the Standard Model, briefly, and mainly to contrast QED with other quantum field theories both for the degree of experimentally-verified precision it has achieved (as of when he gave the lectures the book comes from in the early-mid 1980s) and the huge variety of familiar phenomena one can understand through the theory.