This article examines the forces that have made federal scientific publication an essentially private enterprise. Particular attention is paid to the rise of the scientific community in the American political system. The period under review begins roughly with 1941 and American involvement in World War II, which coincides with the establishment of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (ORSD). The article examines OSRD's method of conducting federal scientific research, its contractual system, and the new publishing paradigm that it engendered. (...) The article concludes in the 1960s with congressional efforts to revise provisions in Title 17, the. (shrink)

In 1949, Richard Feynman published the essentials of his solution to the recalcitrant problems that plagued quantum theories of electrodynamics of his days. The main problem was that the theory, that was considered to be correct and often led to correct observable consequences, also implied that some quantities should be infinite, while by common sense or empirical evidence they were finite. Feynman devised a method of solving the relevant theoretical equations in which particular combinations of elementary solutions yielded empirically adequate (...) results even when applied to complex problems. The combination of the basic solutions was guided by relatively simple graphical considerations... (shrink)

Feynman diagrams are now iconic. Like pictures of the Bohr atom, everyone knows they have something important to do with physics. Those who work in quantum field theory, string theory, and other esoteric fields of physics use them extensively. In spite of this, it is far from clear what they are or how they work. Are they mere calculating tools? Are they somehow pictures of physical reality? Are they models in any interesting sense? Or do they play some other kind (...) of role?It is safe to say they are linked to some sort of calculation tool, but after that it is far from clear. If you ask me how to get from Toronto to Montreal, I could respond two ways: I could tell you to drive north until you... (shrink)

This paper aims to give a substantive account of how Feynman used diagrams in the first lectures in which he explained his new approach to quantum electrodynamics. By critically examining unpublished lecture notes, Feynman’s use and interpretation of both "Feynman diagrams" and other visual representations will be illuminated. This paper discusses how the morphology of Feynman’s early diagrams were determined by both highly contextual issues, which molded his images to local needs and particular physical characterizations, and an overarching common diagrammatic (...) style, which facilitated Feynman’s movement between different diagrams despite their divergent forms and significance. (shrink)

The received view in philosophical studies of quantum field theory is that Feynman diagrams are simply calculational devices. Alongside this view we have the one that takes virtual quanta to be also simply formal tools. This received view was developed and consolidated in philosophy of physics by Mario Bunge, Paul Teller, Michael Redhead, Robert Weingard, Brigitte Falkenburg, and others. In this article I present an alternative to the received view.

There are two distinct interpretations of the role that Feynman diagrams play in physics: (i) they are calculational devices, a type of notation designed to keep track of complicated mathematical expressions; and (ii) they are representational devices, a type of picture. I argue that Feynman diagrams not only have a calculational function but also represent: they are in some sense pictures. I defend my view through addressing two objections and in so doing I offer an account of representation that explains (...) why Feynman diagrams represent. The account that I advocate is a version of that defended by Kendall Walton, which provides us with a basic characterization of the way that representations in general work and is particularly useful for understanding distinctively pictorial representations - in Walton's terms, depictions. The question of the epistemic function of Feynman diagrams as pictorial representations is left for another time. (shrink)

The present paper investigates why logical empiricists remained silent about one of the most philosophy-laden matters of theoretical physics of their day, the principle of least action (PLA). In the two decades around 1900, the PLA enjoyed a remarkable renaissance as a formal unification of mechanics, electrodynamics, thermodynamics, and relativity theory. Taking Ernst Mach's historico-critical stance, it could be liberated from much of its physico-theological dross. Variational calculus, the mathematical discipline on which the PLA was based, obtained a new rigorous (...) basis. These three developments prompted Max Planck to consider the PLA as formal embodiment of his convergent realist methodology. Typically rejecting ontological reductionism, David Hilbert took the PLA as the key concept in his axiomatizations of physical theories. It served one of the main goals of the axiomatic method: ''deepening the foundations.'' Although Moritz Schlick was a student of Planck's, and Hans Hahn and Philipp Frank enjoyed close ties to Gottingen, the PLA became a veritable Shibboleth to them. Rather than being worried by its historical connections with teleology and determinism, they erroneously identified Hilbert's axiomatic method tout court with Planck's metaphysical realism. Logical empiricists' strict containment policy against metaphysics required so strict a separation between physics and mathematics to exclude even those features of the PLA and the axiomatic method not tainted with metaphysics. (shrink)

After a brief presentation of Feynman diagrams, we criticizise the idea that Feynman diagrams can be considered to be pictures or depictions of actual physical processes. We then show that the best interpretation of the role they play in quantum field theory and quantum electrodynamics is captured by Hughes' Denotation, Deduction and Interpretation theory of models, where “models” are to be interpreted as inferential, non-representational devices constructed in given social contexts by the community of physicists.

The paper studies the topography of the model landscape of the physics in the Higgs sector both within the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics and beyond in the months before the discovery of a SM Higgs boson. At first glance, this landscape appears fragmented into a large number of different models and research communities. But it also clusters around certain guiding ideas, among them supersymmetry or dynamical symmetry breaking, in which representative and narrative features of the models are combined. (...) These models do not stand for themselves, waiting to be experimentally confirmed and elevated to the status of theory. Rather do they, quite in the sense advocated by Morgan and Morrison, enjoy a far-reaching autonomy. Typically models in the Higgs sector entertain three types of mediating relationships. First, they mediate between the SM and the data in those instances where the SM contains some uncertainty in the values of its basic parameters. Second, they mediate between BSM physics and the data by instantiating the core ideas behind these often speculative generalizations of the SM as stories—in Hartmann’s sense—that motivate or justify the respective model. Third, the fact that Higgs models within BSM physics reproduce the SM predictions in the low-energy limit functions as a consistency constraint that does not involve any additional autonomy. Due to the second type of mediating relationship, the representative features of Higgs models BSM are complex. (shrink)