I'm not really sure why anyone would want to bother drawing Feynman diagrams if they didn't need to calculate the amplitudes associated with them. There are ve

I'm not really sure why anyone would want to bother drawing Feynman diagrams if they didn't need to calculate the amplitudes associated with them. There are very few physical effects that can be explained through Feynman diagrams without understanding a lot more than this article offers about the math that these diagrams involve. Typically Feynman diagrams are offered as a way to simplify the accounting involved in doing quantum field theory calculations. To treat them as a view of what is "really happening" is a bit misleading, especially to an audience that is not intimately familiar with the oddities of quantum mechanics. I'm not saying everyone needs to understand path integrals to "get" the basics of QFT, but it would be a real mistake to think that you could understand anything nontrivial about the theory by looking at mere Feynman diagrams - QFT's magic is in how you calculate the amplitudes from diagrams, not in the construction of the diagrams themselves. And at the very least, some justification for ignoring the higher level Feynman diagrams needs to be offered, especially since in certain quantum field theories we can't pull the same kind of crap that we can get away with in QED, and it doesn't make any sense to ignore the more complicated diagrams.