Quantum Field Theory: Difference between revisions

|content=“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.” - Feynman

Feynman was not able to simply explain a great deal of things to many people. Including experts. I know that many of you find that shocking.

|content=Even the great Feynman said a great many meretricious things about science. Mostly because he wanted to speak in a powerful and overly simplistic fashion that lay people loved. “Hey, if I can’t understand you, it’s because YOU don’t get it! Ha.”

|content=This is a description of how Feynman’s brilliant “Sum Over Histories” technique went over at the Pocono conference in the spring of 1948. Feynman wasn’t able to explain what he was doing to even the world’s very top experts in Theoretical Physics!

The Internet needs to grow out of its expectation that it can use what is possibly Feynman’s dumbest quote to dismiss those it cannot quickly understand. But it won’t. Why? Because the quote is both powerful and totally wrong.

I look forward to conceding to you. Until then? Maybe go easy on Feynman’s dumbest take?

|content=If you still love repeating that Feynman quote despite the greater context provided, here’s some material. Ask your expository heroes to explain it.

"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."—Richard Feynman. As Quoted in “People”, 22 July 1985.

|content=@karlbykarlsmith Not as I understand it. Feynman’s diagrams are just an indexing scheme for series terms albeit a provocative one. The apparent classical localization of position & momentum is taking place in the indexing diagram, NOT in the quantum propagator which the diagrams sum to construct.

|content=@NukeBeach Ultimately it required more time, more conferences, and Dyson, Bethe, and Wilson to put the full Theory in a form where it was accepted.