series of junior researchers on two-year positions.[2] Young minds
arrived from around the world, with Oppenheimer wanting to
encourage the global flow of ideas. ‘The best way to send information
is to wrap it up in a person,’ as he put it.
The spread of scientific concepts would inspire some of the first
research into the transmission of ideas. During the early 1960s, US
mathematician William Goffman suggested that the transfer of
information between scientists worked much like an epidemic.[3] Just
as diseases like malaria spread from person to person via
mosquitoes, scientific research often passed from scientist to scientist
via academic papers. From Darwin’s theory of evolution to Newton’s
laws of motion and Freud’s psychoanalytic movement, new concepts
had spread to ‘susceptible’ scientists who came into contact with
them.
Still, not everyone was susceptible to Feynman diagrams. One
sceptic was Lev Landau at the Moscow Institute for Physical
Problems. A highly respected physicist, Landau had clear ideas about
how much he respected others; he was known to maintain a list rating
his fellow researchers. Landau used an inverted scale from 0 to 5. A
score of 0 indicated the greatest physicist – a position held only by
Newton in the list – and 5 meant ‘mundane’. Landau rated himself a
2.5, upgrading this to a 2 after he won the 1962 Nobel Prize.[4]
Although Landau rated Feynman as a 1, he wasn’t impressed by
the diagrams, seeing them as a distraction from more important
problems. Landau hosted a popular weekly seminar at the Moscow
Institute. Twice, speakers tried to present Feynman diagrams; both
times they were kicked off the podium before they could finish their
talks. When a PhD student said he was planning to follow Feynman’s
lead, Landau accused him of ‘fashion chasing’. Landau did eventually
use the diagrams in a 1954 paper, but he outsourced the tricky
analysis to two of his students. ‘This is the first work where I could not
carry out the calculations myself’, he admitted to a colleague.[5]
What effect did people like Landau have on the spread of
Feynman diagrams? In 2005, physicist Luís Bettencourt, historian
David Kaiser and their colleagues decided to find out.[6] Kaiser had
previously collected academic journals published around the world in