Forty-odd years after US physicist Richard Feynman decorated his van with the wig-gly diagrams that had won him a share of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics, the hunt is on for ways to improve on those representations. Feynman's images depict ways in which subatomic particles interact during collisions, giving physicists an easy-to-visualize way to calculate 'scattering amplitudes': mathematical expressions that define the probabilities of various outcomes. High-energy physicists and quantum-gravity theorists alike are seeking a deeper understanding of those interactions, in work that ranges from the development of geometric ways of representing the terms used to calculate the scattering of particles, to the practical development of better algorithms. The effort has potentially broad consequences. The emergence of a definitive set of tools would make life easier for researchers attempting to calculate the events that occur in particle colliders. And, on a more profound level, it might reveal the structure of space-time in a future quantum theory of gravity -a breakthrough that would unify modern physics.
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