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More than 20 years ago, Konstantin N. Rozanov of the Institute for Theoretical and Applied Electrodynamics in Moscow, Russia, figured out the most light over a range of wavelengths that a device of a certain thickness could absorb if one side was lined with metal.

During a talk at a conference, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who devised much of quantum electrodynamics, “without much difficulty shot me to pieces, which I deserved,” he said.

In the Caltech interview, he recalled a paper in which he suggested that gravity could solve some troubling infinities that were showing up in the quantum field theory of electrodynamics.

Mead called the result “collective electrodynamics” and used that term as the title of a “little green book” on the topic that he published in 2001.

This caused a lot of trouble when the theory of quantum electrodynamics first came out.