by David Kaiser, University of Chicago Press. Hardback ISBN 0226422666, ($80). Paperback ISBN 0226422674, ($30).
With the use of rich archival materials, interviews, and more than 500 scientific articles from the period, the author uses Feynman diagrams as a means to explore the development of American postwar physics. By focusing on the ways that young physicists learned new calculational skills, the story is framed around the crafting and stabilizing of the basic tools in the physicist’s kit, thus offering the first book to follow the diagrams once they left Feynman’s hands and entered the physics vernacular.
