They're just a pictorial way of arranging calculations involving pretty technical stuff really. You're not expected to make sense of it without going through th

They're just a pictorial way of arranging calculations involving pretty technical stuff really. You're not expected to make sense of it without going through the (roughly grad school level physics) groundwork. I get that this can be frustrating, but maybe it's not a good idea sticking them in popsci just because they look intuitive. I mean, they are, but only after you've learnt about the machinery behind them. For instance I wouldn't know how to convey the difference between fermionic lines and the bosonic ones without working through commutation and anticommutation relations, the gamma matrices, spinors, the different propagators and so on. Saying simply that fermions are straight lines with oriented arrows, bosons are wiggly lines and we'll draw them like this... doesn't help much when it comes to understanding what they mean, in my opinion.