John Preskill

speaker

321 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 29 May

John Preskill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · The Brilliant Mr. Feynman (Update) · 27 May 2026 podcast

So picture this diagram.

There are these two lines, both with arrows on them.

And then there's a line connecting the two.

So it looks like one rung of a ladder.

And the line going across is the wiggly line.

That's the photon that's being emitted by one particle and absorbed by the other.

Now, we could have more photons.

So now add another rung to the ladder.

Now we've got the one line with an arrow on it, solid line, let's say, going up.

And now another line with the arrow going down.

That's the electron and the positron.

Now there are two rungs.

There's a wiggly line and then another wiggly line.

And that's another Feynman diagram.

The electron and the positron can collide with one another, and that can give rise to particles of light, photons, but then those photons convert to other particles like quarks and anti-quarks, and those interact with other particles.

like gluons and so on.

And to keep track of all those things that can happen and how to quantitatively evaluate how all those different processes contribute to the total rate, that's a pretty complicated problem.

Feynman diagrams can help you organize that type of computation.

These are incredibly difficult and unwieldy for 99.999% of the human race.

And that 0.001% that could work with them was Julian Schwinger.

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