Let’s draw Feynman diagrams!
blogs.uslhc.us
blogs.uslhc.us
Typically Feynman diagrams are offered as a way to simplify the accounting involved in doing quantum field theory calculations. To treat them as a view of what is "really happening" is a bit misleading, especially to an audience that is not intimately familiar with the oddities of quantum mechanics. I'm not saying everyone needs to understand path integrals to "get" the basics of QFT, but it would be a real mistake to think that you could understand anything nontrivial about the theory by looking at mere Feynman diagrams - QFT's magic is in how you calculate the amplitudes from diagrams, not in the construction of the diagrams themselves.
And at the very least, some justification for ignoring the higher level Feynman diagrams needs to be offered, especially since in certain quantum field theories we can't pull the same kind of crap that we can get away with in QED, and it doesn't make any sense to ignore the more complicated diagrams.
To treat them as a view of what is "really happening" is a bit misleading, especially to an audience that is not intimately familiar with the oddities of quantum mechanics.
There is no simplified layman's view of any complex subject which is not at least a bit misleading.
And at the very least, some justification for ignoring the higher level Feynman diagrams needs to be offered
Audience. The post starts out by mentioning that he's talking only about stuff that could be done by school children, or the whole family. It's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I didn't get the impression that he was completely unserious about that.
In any case, there's more to Feynman diagrams than your comment implies. For example, think of the optical theorem. You can take a diagram with a loop in the middle and cut it in half, and get two diagrams of a lower order, say originally you had A + B -> C + D and you get A + B -> X and X -> C + D (where X can be any number of particles), and the amplitude for the former is the integral over all momenta of the amplitudes for the sequence of the latter. What it means is you can think of a "true" physical sequence of events, A + B -> X followed by X -> C + D, which contributes to the cross-section for A + B -> C + D and the math behind it is the same as used for the A + B -> C + D scattering with a not-"true" X (i.e., X with non-physical momenta) in the middle of the Feynman diagram.