✎ Feynman Diagrams [The Physics Travel Guide]

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====== Feynman Diagrams ======

Feynman’s diagrams and rules were a sort of bookkeeping-by-picture process that miraculously captured all the details of the standard model in a series of diagrams; they allowed people less talented than Feynman to perform the most complex calculations carefully and correctly. Many of the great advances in physics are like this; they codify and make routine what was formerly almost impossible to think about.Whenever I have a new problem to work on—in physics or options theory—the first major struggle is to gain some intuition about how to proceed; the second struggle is to transform this intuition into something more formulaic, a set of rules anyone can follow, rules that no longer require the original insight itself. In this way, one person’s breakthrough becomes everybody’s possession.

<cite>From My Life As A Quant by Emanuel Derman</cite>
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<blockquote>
Julian Schwinger once said rather bitterly that "Feynman brought quantum field theory to the masses," by which he meant that any dullard could memorize a few "Feynman rules," call himself or herself a field theorist, and build a credible career. Generations learned Feynman diagrams without understanding field theory. Heavens to Betsy, there are still university professors like that walking around!

<cite>from the preface of Feynman's [[http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8169.html|The Strange Theory of Light and Matter]] by A. Zee</cite>
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<note tip>
Explanations in this section should contain no formulas, but instead colloquial things like you would hear them during a coffee break or at a cocktail party.
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* [[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.04182.pdf|Feynman Diagrams for Beginners]] by Krešimir Kumericki
  * [[http://www.pp.rhul.ac.uk/~kauer/projects/scripts/ohl.pdf|Feynman Diagrams For Pedestrians]] by Thorsten Ohl
  * David Griffith: Elementary Particles contains an absolutely painless introduction to Feynman diagrams.
  * For another nice introduction see [[https://www.iop.vast.ac.vn/theor/conferences/vsop/18/files/QFT-6.pdf|chapter 6 in An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory]] by Luis Álvarez-Gaumé
  * R.D. Mattuck: A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-body Problem
  * For the derivation of the Feynman rules for a given theory see section 2 of [[http://cds.cern.ch/record/186259/|Diagrammar]] by Veltman and 'tHooft
 
<tabbox Researcher>

<note tip>
The motto in this section is: //the higher the level of abstraction, the better//.
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<tabbox History> 
<blockquote>It struck Feynman that everyone had a favorite principle or theorem and he was violating them all… Feynman knew he had failed. At the time, he was in anguish. Later he said simply: “I had too much stuff. My machines came from too far away.”[...] Schwinger’s students at Harvard were put at a competitive disadvantage, or so it seemed to their fellows elsewhere, who suspected them of surreptitiously using the diagrams anyway. This was sometimes true… Murray Gell-Mann later spent a semester staying in Schwinger’s house and loved to say afterward that he had searched everywhere for the Feynman diagrams. He had not found any, but one room had been locked…<cite>from "Genius" by Gleick</cite></blockquote>

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