Drawing Theories Apart

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1. beezleOct 2021
   Anyone interested in diagrams should consider reading "Drawing Theories Apart The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics" at some point. You don't have to be at an expert level (though it certainly helps) to understand the majority of it.

   https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo353430...

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2. beezleMay 2019
   Drawing Theories Apart is an excellent book on Feynman Diagrams. You don't have to be actively involved in nuclear or hep to understand but the material is not for the faint of heart and a decent background in those areas goes a long way.

   https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Theories-Apart-Dispersion-Dia...

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3. evanbJul 2017
   I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

   CULTURAL

   Einstein - Essays in Humanism

   Frayn - Copenhagen

   Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

   Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

   de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

   Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

   Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

   Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

   Macaulay - The Way Things Work

   Paulos - Innumeracy

   Sagan - Cosmos

   Sagan - Broca's Brain

   Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

   Salam - Science in the Third World

   Seife - Zero

   Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

   POPULAR

   Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)

   Feynman - The Meaning of It All

   Feynman - Lectures on Physics

   Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

   Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

   Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

   Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

   Hawking - A Brief History of Time

   Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

   Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

   Polya - How to Solve It

   Schrödinger - What is Life?

   Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

   Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

   Wallace - Everything And More

   Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

   Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

   TEXTS

   Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )

   Abelson and Sussman - SICP

   Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics

   Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

   Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

   Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

   Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

   Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

   Fermi - Thermodynamics

   Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

   Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

   Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

   Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

   Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)

   Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

   Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

   Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

   Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

   Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

   Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

   Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

   Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)

   Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

   Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

   Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

   Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

   Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

   Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell

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4. beezleJul 2016
   A good read on the historical development and use of Feynman diagrams is Drawing Theories Apart The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Theories-Apart-Dispersion-Dia...
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5. pjaOct 2017
   Nope, but a quick Google suggests that this paper:

   “Spreading the Tools of Theory: Feynman Diagrams in the USA, Japan, and the Soviet Union” by David Kaiser, Kenji Ito and Karl Hall

   http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/Kaiser.SpreadingTools.pdf

   must have been the original source research.

   edit: Also, there’s a book (by one of the authors of that paper): “Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion Of Feynman Diagrams In Postwar Physics” https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002Y5W2X2

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6. pjaOct 2017
   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

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