The Genesis of Feynman Diagrams

(A)phantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory: Scientific and personal perspectives

“…Although Farmelo (2009) reports that Dirac was "always uneasy with algebraic approaches to physics and with any mathematical process he could not picture", it is striking that he nonetheless prefaced his "Principles of Quantum Mechanics" by saying: "the laws of physics do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any very direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies" (Dirac, 1930). Although Feynman greatly admired Dirac, his famous diagrams were a direct response to the latter's implicit challenge to find a pictorial tool that could be of value in quantum mechanics (Wuetrich, 2010).…”

On the interpretation of Feynman diagrams, or, did the LHC experiments observe H → γγ?

“…Thus, while the above mentioned "pictorial" role and the separation from the mathematical underpinning was foreign to Dyson, it was apparently closer to Feynman's thinking. 6 This marks the "Feynman-Dyson split" as David Kaiser has dubbed this 6 The origin of Feynman diagrams has been investigated more closely by Adrian Wüthrich (2010). "[...] tension between Feynman's and Dyson's positions, with their varying emphases on 'intuition' versus derivation, physical pictures versus topological indicators."…”

How Do Feynman Diagrams Work?

“…Feynman, it seems, was perfectly aware; he was not claiming otherwise. This rejection of FDs as pictures of motion in space and time seems right as far as it goes, but the conclusion that FDs are merely calculation tools is not yet warranted and has been rightly criticized (Meynell 2008;Wüthrich 2010). There are other representational possibilities to consider (most recently by Stöltzner 2017).…”

“…How were they extended to quantum chromodynamics and other fields? These are historical questions and have been well discussed in the excellent books by Kaiser (2005), Schweber (1994), andWüthrich (2010). I am more interested in philosophical issues concerning how FDs are currently used and why they are successful.…”