Yet he hardly had less faith in them for all that-he had other reasons for finding his results "physically plausible," and often those plausibility arguments hung on his intuitions and imagery. In fact, he often emphasized up front that many of the results he was reporting had not yet been rigorously derived, and that perhaps they couldn't be (at least not by himself). In most of his articles during this period, he made it clear that he was introducing handy calculational approaches rather than rigorously derived results. Feynman was definitely a visual thinker-no question about it. Would you say that Feynman was a visual thinker? Do you think his visual approach to these diagrams gave him insight into thinking about these invisible worlds different from his colleagues who worked only with numbers?ĭ. And so he began his doodlings in the late 1940s.į. He decided first to try to take charge of the algebraic morass, streamlining the laborious algebraic manipulations, before worrying about the mysteries of the infinities. After the war, a new crop of young theoretical physicists, including Feynman, returned to QED and its problems. Worse, these nasty calculations almost always returned infinity, even when physicists asked straightforward questions. In the early days of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the 1920s and 1930s, calculations were notoriously convoluted, the algebra often spilling over seven and eight lines just to calculate a single quantity. Can you give us a historical perspective on when and why Feynman began his drawings?ĭ.
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