The Spread of Feynman Diagrams in the USA, Japan, and the USSR (2004) [pdf]

web.mit.edu

41 pointspja2 comments

Posted this in the discussion on Tesla's shipping difficulties & dctoedt suggested it be posted on it's own.

Knoweldge transfer is hard. This paper is about tracking the spread of the use of Feynman Diagrams (which helped enormously as an aid to the calculation of QM results using perturbation methods) within the physics community, but I think it contains lessons for all of us.

The work was expanding into a book by David Kaiser: “Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion Of Feynman Diagrams In Postwar Physics” https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002Y5W2X2

I think knowledge transfer is hard, because teaching requires time for neurons to reorganize or maybe fix themselves in place, in order to properly cement a retainable fact. It’s just a quirk of the human condition that amounts of memory persist at limited speeds.

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