Feynman Diagrams, Edward Tufte sculptures and exhibits

[ET’s Feynman diagrams are] “Art, science, authenticity, precision, beauty, insight.”

— Chris Quigg, theoretical physicist at Fermilab, author of Gauge Theories of the Strong, Weak, and Electromagnetic Interactions.

ET’s stainless steel Feynman Diagrams are installed at the new World Trade Center building, Fermilabs, Hogpen Hill Farms, and in many private collections.

A current exhibition is at the Williamson Gallery, ArtCenter College for Design. Planning in underway for an exhibit at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm honoring Richard Feynman’s 100th birthday.

32 new stainless-steel Feynman diagrams by Edward Tufte at Fermilab.

The matrix of 32 diagrams was constructed by Tatsumi Aoyama, Masashi Hayakawa, Toichiro Kinoshita, and Makiko Nio, “Complete Tenth-Order QED Contribution to the Muon g – 2,” Physical Review Letters, 109, 111808-3 (2012) and represent

“Self-energy-like diagrams representing 32 gauge-invariant subsets contributing to the lepton g – 2 at the tenth order. Solid lines represent lepton lines propagating in a weak magnetic field.”

In the stainless steel artwork, the 32 visually delightful diagrams cast changing shadows on the wall mounting. These new diagrams supplement the Fermilab exhibit The Cognitive Art of Feynman Diagrams, which will close on June 26.

The artwork was designed and constructed by Edward Tufte, Andy Conklin, and Brad MacDougall. Thanks to Chris Quigg for pointing out PRL paper.

Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Art of Feynman Diagrams exhibit,
Fermilab Art Gallery, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, April 12 – June 26, 2014.

Here is the 20-page catalog for the Fermilab exhibit:

Fermilab has a most interesting architecture. Here are some of the buildings and Fermilab sculpture. Photographs below taken late January 2014:

My exhibit at Fermilab makes me very happy: will also teach a short course on scientific visualization for the staff, and meet people who actually know how Feynman diagrams work!

Fermilab have some Feynman diagrams cut out of steel as part of a walkway.
Below an ImageQuilt from our Chrome app ImageQuilts and the images:

Below, here is the 16-page exhibit catalog (PDF), with a paper edition for the exhibit at ET Modern.

This thread below served during the last 18 months as an on-going rough draft of the exhibit essay now published as a pdf (above) and also in paper.

Now back to the original thread that began August 2011:

My studio colleagues Andy Conklin and Brad McDougall bent and welded the stainless steel based on my templates and consequent editing of the steel.

Our stainless Feynman diagrams are mounted on an Airstream trailer, a reference to Richard Feynman’s 1975 Dodge Maxivan which he customized with a diagrammatic mural. Below are pictures of my 2004 visit to Feynman’s van, then garaged in Long Beach, California. (An account of that visit is in Michael
Shermer’s Scientific American article “The Feynman-Tufte Principle”.)

Shown here above in our sculpture studio, the Airstream trailer is a proposed Mars Exploration Vehicle, or perhaps an Intergalactic Explorer, and is part of a larger sculpture (Rocket Science #3) in the Rocket Science #1 and Rocket Science #2 sequence.

Since the Feynman diagrams describe universal events in Nature, intelligent extra-terrestrial life may well know all about them. On this point, see the Pioneer Space Plaque Redesign.

I wrote about (and gently redesigned) Feynman diagrams in Beautiful Evidence, pages 76-77 shown below.

These pages also provide explanations of the diagrams used on the Airstream Interplanetary Explorer.

Feynman diagrams enumerate all possible sequences for a fixed set of quantum objects and events. Therefore a complete set provides intriguing design permutations and optical experiences.

Greg Mahlon’s example below shows a small multiple of the 120 possible event-sequences for 6-photon scattering by means of Bill Dimm’s helpful computer program at FeynDiagram.com

Source: http://feyndiagram.com/examples/photon6.php