Why Feynman Diagrams Are Worth 10,000 Formulae: A Representational Epistemological Analysis

Feynman Diagrams are an indispensable and powerful tool in particle physics. They effectively support comprehension and computation in quantum electrodynamics (QED), and are generalisable to other quantum field theories. They are a paradigmatic example of how diagrams enable understanding and problem solving in complex knowledge domains. This paper examines why they are so effective from a cognitive perspective by adopting a representational epistemological approach that shows the completeness and coherence of the epistemic functions of Feynman Diagrams when encoding the concepts of QED.