The story behind this piece
Richard Feynman's diagrams turned quantum field theory into pictures you can calculate from. This plate sets seven of them in gold on deep blue: electron–positron annihilation into muons, Compton scattering, neutron beta decay through a W⁻ boson, a colour-swapping gluon exchange between quarks, pair production near a nucleus, the vacuum-polarisation loop that makes α run, and the Z⁰ neutral current. Time runs left to right. Photons are wavy lines and gluons are curls. Antiparticles travel against their arrows, and charge is conserved at every vertex. A key in the first panel explains each kind of line.
