"Drawing Theories Apart : The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics" by David Kaiser

Some of you have accused me of Feynman hero worship. To which I plead guilty, but with exceptions! I certainly admire the guy for certain qualities, but like everyone, he was human and so comes along with all the lovely faults and trivialities that make up our entertaining species. But on to the subject at hand: I just finished reading Drawing Theories Apart : The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics by David Kaiser.
This book was once a thesis. Parts of it read like it was once a thesis. On the other hand, I really like reading theses. But still, there are times which I wish a little more editing had been done to lead to a more narrative tone.
That being said, I mostly recommend this book to the hard core affectionado of the early history of quantum field theory. But if you are such a rare beast (I suspect most physicsts are!), this book is very entertaining. The most interesting component of the first half of this book involves the “split” between Feynman and Dyson on their take on the diagrams (interestingly, early on, the diagrams were often referred to as Feynman-Dyson diagrams) and how this difference could be traced through the postdocs and graduate students who learned the techniques from either Feynman or Dyson. It is interesting how the rigor of Dyson and physical intuition of Feynman could be explicitly seen in how they drew the diagrams. Dyson would draw the diagrams always with right angles, clearly indicating that they were simply a tool for bookkeeping the perturbation theory. Feynman’s diagrams on the other hand, had tilted lines, much more suggestive of the path integral formulation of quantum theory which Feynman had in mind in coming up with the rules for the diagrams.
The second half of the book is dedicated to a study of Geoffrey Chew and his idea of nuclear democracy. I certainly wish that this part of the book had more details, as this story is fascinating, but on the whole the book gives a nice introduction to the S-matrix dispersion tools and the basic ideas of the bootstrap and looks at how diagramatic methods played a role in this work (no longer really Feynman diagrams.) Interestingly I learned that Chew was probably the first professor to resign in protest over the University of California’s requirement of an anti-communist oath. Good for Chew.