Five Big Lines: Representing the BigLittle World in Feynman Diagrams

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post #123

Perhaps the only bigger five put-together lines than Feynman diagrams may be home plate; otherwise I’m hard pressed to come up with a better thing that can be drawn in this way with this many lines.

The impossibly bright Richard Feynman (1918-1988, Nobel in 1955 for the development of quantum electrodynamics; physics of superfluidity; path integral formulation of QM, etc.) worked on a schematic that would  visualize—indeed, stand for--quantum electrodynamical interactions, the scattering calculations in QFT. The result is known by nearly everyone on earth as Feynman diagrams. (Murray Gell-Mann, another Nobelist and ueber diligent partner and competitor of Feynman’s, and perhaps as influential a physicist (with the Eightfold Way and etc.), refers to the diagrams as Stuckelberg diagrams, named for a pretty obscure physicist who, among others, came up with an early schemata closely resembling Feynman diagrams. His refusal smacks more than a little of retribution and competitive jealousy even 20 years after Feynman’s death.)

The images here are the first time the diagrams were published in the 15 September 1949 issue of The Physical Review and are among the top-20 prettiest pictures in physics of the 20^th century.

Their descriptive power is matched only by their crystalline simplicity—few diagrams have ever been constructed with a greater claim.