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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2009
When you follow two separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate the truth.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Disappearance of Lady Frances CarfaxABSTRACT. It is now well established that effects traditionally associated with vacuum electromagnetic field fluctuations can be described equally well in terms of source fields (radiation reaction). This remarkable reconciliation of two previously unconnected points of view, which was stimulated by Jaynes' neoclassical theory, is reviewed and explained in a general and simple way.
Background
The Jaynes-Cummings paper seems to have been the first to employ dressed states of two-state atoms in fields (Jaynes 1963). One result found in that paper is that semiclassical radiation theory could serve as an excellent approximation even under certain conditions where the average number of photons in the field is small. The accuracy of semiclassical theory paved the way to Jaynes' “neoclassical theory,” where even spontaneous emission was treated without field quantization (Jaynes 1972, Milonni 1976).
The neoclassical theory was a subject of much debate and misunderstanding in the 1970s. It turned out not to be so easy to dismiss it on experimental grounds.
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