edit: Also, there’s a book (by one of the authors of that paper): “Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion Of Feynman Diagrams In Postwar Physics” https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002Y5W2X2
The Kaiser et al. paper cited by 'pja is fascinating. This passage (at 887) practically puts the reader in the room at the Institute for Advanced Study:
<blockquote>
... Thus, when [Freeman] Dyson arrived at the Institute for Advanced Study in September 1948, Feynman diagrams in hand, he immediately joined ten fellow ‘postdocs’ in theoretical physics, the largest cohort yet.
[J. Robert Oppenheimer had reorganized the Institute to emphasize post-doc training for physicists; he was quoted as saying that "the best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person."]
In fact, the new building that had been planned to hold offices for the newly expanded ranks had not been completed on time, so all of the postdocs wound up sharing desks in one large room for the first 6 weeks of their stay – an architectural arrangement perfectly suited for the sharing of tacit knowledge.
They huddled around large tables swapping ideas, pressing Dyson to explain the details of how to use Feynman diagrams. He delivered several sets of long lectures to the group, supplemented by constant, informal conversations.
By the winter of 1948–49, Dyson had organized them into several groups, each working on distinct diagrammatic calculations. One pair, Kenneth Watson and Joseph Lepore, worked with Dyson to calculate high-order terms in a certain model of nuclear forces, while another duo, Norman Kroll and Robert Karplus, took up Dyson’s lead to undertake similarly complex diagrammatic calculations in QED.
So effective were Dyson’s tutorials that Wolfgang Pauli wrote to another of the young Institute theorists that May, asking what Dyson and the rest of the ‘Feynman-school’ were working on.
It got a second chance & got 33 votes the second time, but no discussion. Oh well - maybe it needs an explanatory blogpost or two in order to draw people in.
“Spreading the Tools of Theory: Feynman Diagrams in the USA, Japan, and the Soviet Union” by David Kaiser, Kenji Ito and Karl Hall
http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/Kaiser.SpreadingTools.pdf
must have been the original source research.
edit: Also, there’s a book (by one of the authors of that paper): “Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion Of Feynman Diagrams In Postwar Physics” https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002Y5W2X2