… is an expression Richard Feynman had used in his 1949 paper Space-Time Approach to Quantum Electrodynamics.
It seems to be one of the earliest publications featuring his famous diagrams.
Feynman diagrams are related to interactions of particles, and they look like cartoon illustrations of particles bumping into each other. But they are actually mnemonics for integrals: Integrals needed to calculate something we could compare with an experiment. If we smash together particles in a particle collider, the scattering cross-section is such an interesting number. It indicates the probability that certain interesting processes are going to happen!
Feynman diagrams remind us of an era when software was neither ubiquitous nor convenient. When you had to get creative to comprehend these mathematical expressions. When you had to find a way to make complicated things accessible to a human mind and could not outsource the hard work to a computer.
This small painting in the style of a book cover is my tribute to Feynman’s ingenuity. Feynman was also a synaesthete according to the biography by James Gleick – Feynman saw mathematical symbols in colors. So, I hope he would like my version!
I’ve reproduced several diagrams of the 1949 paper and overlapped them to create a tessellation of the surface.
Materials: Watercolor pencil and fine liner on A5-sized watercolor paper (5.8 x 8.3 in), glued to foam board, varnished with spray coating.
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