His motto "What I cannot create, I do not understand" has been one of the driving forces in my own quest to understand more about the world around me. A good friend had picked up a corollary which was "What I cannot teach, I do not understand" which I think was quite similar. Definitely one of my heroes.
And the corollary to that, from 17th century French writer Nicolas Boileau: "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément." - What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.
I'm french and I have a great memory about that quote. In high school my litterature and physics teachers had a disagreement about it, although I believe they didn't know about each other's point of views. Only us the students did, as they each hand waved great insights about the world with this quote. One was arguing, much like you, about the profound truth there is to it. The other was quick to explain that they perfectly conceived how to ride a bicycle, but like most of us couldn't possibly teach it at a blackboard. I leave it to you to guess which was which :)
I took up social dancing in my 20s, including salsa and Argentinian tango. I think that it is a very good way to experience the difference between being very good at something and being able to teach.
I've been on courses with some people that are clearly exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that, but they make you feel good about learning.
One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked about some high level move being complicated, he said that it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's simpler than it appears.
That's were I put my money, but I could see it going either way.
This can devolve into a definitional argument, but I actually think it's fair to say we don't understand how we ride a bike. We have many abilities and fluencies we don't understand, or only partially understand, in the sense that we can't break them down into pieces easily and transmit the information. That perspective feels more accurate to me than saying I understand how I ride a bike because I can ride a bike, though in common usage the phrase "I understand how to ride a bike" would be perfectly acceptable.
The subtle distinction between the phrase "knows how to" and "understands" hints at the difference here.
We(by which I mean a person who knows how to ride a bike) do understand how to ride a bike. The problem in communicating that is a riding a bike is a skilled act. that is you cant get good at riding a bike by reading about it, and it is very hard to describe a well trained skill, it boils down to "practice a lot" which makes nobody happy.
One of the reasons you can’t get good at riding a bike by reading about it is that we literally don’t understand the mechanics of bike riding. It’s a currently unsolved problem in physics. Google it if you do t believe me!
So I get what you’re saying, but it is maybe not the optimal example.
Even if we could perfectly and accurately explain the mechanics and mathematical representations of riding a bike, it would still be useless knowledge even to the few people capable of understanding it in terms of utility in riding one.
> This conservative non-holonomic system has a seven-dimensional accessible configuration space and three velocity degrees of freedom parametrized by rates of frame lean, steer angle and rear wheel rotation.
I always adore the split between how my brain does things instinctually, but making it arbitrary completely demolishes the 'natural' flow of it. Same with complex ball throwing / bouncing trajectory calculations.
It also immediately makes me angry about how we teach math. When you learn about powers (squares, cubes, roots, etc), these things are just written out as arbitrary concepts instead of displaying them geometrically.
Hell, when I was first taught the Pythagorean theorem, it was just explained by drawing a triangle with A² + B² = C², without also drawing out the related squares of each side. Immediately doing that would instill so much more intuition into the math. In general, mathematical concepts gain so much clarity by doing them geometrically.
Sibling comment to yours points to a relatively recent (this century) article with a mostly complete theoretical model for bike self-stability. There are other theories though, some more or less developed than others. It turns out to be a fiendishly hard control-theory problem, and at least one aspect is chaotic. Which theory is correct has not, to my knowledge, been definitively determined by experiment. Until it is, I think it is fair to say that it is unsolved.
Unlike lift, which is very well understood but often poorly explained.
That's easy! It pushes air down, and the reaction force is what we call lift!
... now, why it pushes air down... there be many computational fluid dynamics PhDs... though "angle of attack" covers a lot, and the rest is just efficiency tweaks.
Good question for teachers who insist it's the Bernoulli Principle: "But my paper airplane has flat wings and flies just fine!" toss across classroom
That's a great rebuttal. But if the actual claim is "I cannot teach..." It is still consistent. No one is claiming to teach you how to ride a bike or be in a relationship or know when to leave a party. "I cannot teach what I cannot understand" is not the inverse: "I can teach everything I understand".
> What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.
And the other side of the coin to both is a powerful trick to really nail a topic you feel like you have gaps on: get the basics and teach it / explain it to someone; you then have to explain it clearly thus have to fill all the gaps.
I'm a native English speaker who, a lifetime ago, moved to Shanghai to teach English to adults. One of my biggest struggles when I first started was explaining to students not just what the correct English should be in a given situation, but why that was the correct English. This had a profound effect on my view of expertise and experts in general.
As someone that speaks English as my second language, the trick of English is to memorize all the exceptions and then accept that the English spelling is just made up to mess with foreigners.
Looking at you, the "b" in debt, that I was pronouncing for a long time growing up and learning a lot of words from reading.
A big one is also "ed" like "jogged". It looks like jog ged, so surely it's pronounced that way. Bahaha, no - gotcha! It's jogd! But we like extra letters and there must be vowels even when completely and absolutely unpronounced. Not sure if this is better or worse than Russian which seems to have no problem with squeezing a half dozen consonants side by side and saying, 'good luck.'
Exactly correct, but I would say 'Where it gets interesting ...' as opposed to complicated. Like the bike riding comment in a peer to the parent of this comment, there is a difference between 'operating' and 'creating' right? Knowing how to ride a bike tells you nothing about how to design a bike. It is not uncommon in my experience that people mix up these two things all the time.
One my personal trick: imagine that you are magically transported into the 19-th century (or earlier). Can you teach the subject to a well-known scientist of that era?
E.g. if you want to explain radioactivity to somebody from 1860-s, how would you do that? Or for math, how would you explain calculus to Archimedes?
Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?
Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe?
Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.
This thought experiment reminds me of Mark Twain's novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which the main character is a 19th-century American man transported back to 6th-century Britain. He used his experience in firearms manufacture to introduce modern weapons and had bicycles constructed for the knights to ride around on. I always thought it was pretty farfetched that he'd be able to recreate such complex technology without the aid of modern tools, much less set up factories to manufacture it in pre-industrial times. But it is a bit fun to imagine someone using knowledge of modern technology to pose as a wizard. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
> Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?
That's an interesting topic, and there's a whole community that is interested in this. Mostly for historical and educational reasons.
Surprisingly, there are quite a few things you can reasonably do. You will never be able to build a useful internal combustion engine starting in a pre-industrial time. But you'll be able to introduce the positional decimal notation (took 4000 years to invent!), double-entry bookkeeping, paper making, printing press.
If you know a bit of technology, then you can create water plumbing (just avoid lead), and at least some metalworking.
A similar thing I heard about the amish, is that it is not that they are anti technology, it is that they Don't want technology they can't control, basically if unable to make from raw materials they don't want it.
Now I don't think this is entirely the way things are, I suspect there is a core of truth with a lot of religion and tradition surrounding it. But I have a lot of sympathy for wanting to have the freedom that control over your environment grants you. Personally I would hate to give up my tech. and remain a willing slave to the manufactures.
It's impossible, even for Feynman, to understand how to create everything. In your example the Amish idea of "we" is religious bias — each Amish individual doesn't know how to create everything, they choose to rely only on other Amish, shunning the knowledge of others. "we" can also take on patriotic bias, as in, "we" don't build anything anymore because it's all made in China, thus excluding China from that "we". The fading globalist dream of the 90s was that "we" could include everybody on our little planet.
I tend to agree, but teaching another person is also a whole different set of skills from being able to drive something yourself.
One prominent example is the "curse of knowledge"; it may take a lot of practice becoming a beginner to be able to teach for a beginner's perspective in your area of expertise.
God, thank you. I really dislike the old aphorism that if you can't teach something you don't understand it.
Teaching is a whole complicated skill unto itself, especially if one is teaching to beginners. Like (since we're on HN), how easy is it to imagine someone very good at programming but would be a terrible choice as a Comp Sci 101 prof? I'm guessing "very."
The whole idea deeply undermines teachers of all subjects.
I think that “teach” has a different meaning here. There is “understanding something well enough to elaborate it in its entirety” (the technical capacity to teach it) and then there is the former + “and have the skill/talent of being able to explain it to a wide variety of other people from different backgrounds.”
This is even more relevant in the LLM era. LLMs can spit out an answer to a question. But if you cannot understand and assess those claims at a deep level, you are not adding any value to the process.
He was misogynistic and, by his own admission, did not hold women in high regard. I don’t remember exactly but I think he even admitted that at some point in his life he didn’t believe women could be scientists, or at least not as good as men. I think that by the end of his life he had matured and outgrown this.
He was deeply affected by the death of his first wife. I personally believe that he developed misogynistic traits as a way of self-defense and driven by the pain of her loss. They were deeply in love. His farewell letter to her is so beautiful and touching, and yet so pragmatic, in a way that only Feynman could be.
He is a personal hero but I do understand he was human and as such, a flawed individual like anyone else.
All the first page results of my Google search are positive, except for the one video (not near the top of the results) that has a provocative title but is 2 hours long. I’m not going to watch that. Can you link to the negative stuff you’re seeing?
I’ve watched 2 Angela Collier videos on him albeit in the background — you’d probably have to watch the whole thing to truly understand the “bad rep” and I can’t speak to how widespread the bad rep is.
My memory is, misogyny, cringey stories that were surely greatly exaggerated and just happen to make Feynman the smartest guy in every room, kind of a jerk in general, divorce due to claimed domestic violence, never did the work of writing a book personally but has the reputation of being a prolific author, his pop appeal makes people elevate him to the very top minds of physics when the work of others was much more impactful.
Richard Feynman having the quantum Hall effect on his "to learn" list is amazing. I mean, it makes sense, because less than three years before he died the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for its discovery. But it shows that even one of the greatest physicists of his generation had not fully grasped something that is now part of every undergraduate physics degree's standard curriculum and is arguably much less complicated than, say, Feynman's contributions to Quantum Electrodynamics.
I agree. Someone might be able to understand and reproduce some basic components of the system in the same way I use mathematics effectively, but to say I have an understanding of the fundamentals at any level like Wolfram does.
Yeah, imagine if the undergrads had to write out the underlying proof. When I took physics classes the professors would do things for our exams like assume gravity is 10 ms to give people an easier time with the numbers, and of course the spherical frictionless cow.
Also, the way many discoveries are explained in a course is usually very streamlined compared to the papers that present them initially and defend them in detail on a limited number of pages.
I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog:
“One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.”
That is the sort of quote which gives psychiatry a bad name. Of course people want (and achieve) things, label-referrent-object wordplay aside, and of course people come to learn things, despite there being an infinite level of skill achievable. Imagine if instead of talking about kung foo they'd said "peeling potatoes", or "crossing the road", or "taking a shower". Same paradoxes around completion, but somehow less mysteriously unmasterable.
I once wanted to learn how to change the oil in my car. I learned, and then I changed the oil in my car. It was never about wanting to want to learn about my car.
After you learnt it, did you keep on feeling good about that forever or did it just fade away into the pile of other things you don't care about anymore while you went on to want to learn new things?
I almost want to read it as satire. Especially juxtaposed against his death. Because the ideas of "What I cannot create, I do not understand." and "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved" seem profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.
If you are calling Richard Feynman "profoundly unwise" and "endlessly futile", you might need to do a bit more reflection on the grounding for your opinion.
Surely it can be true that a profoundly wise and consistently effective person holds a belief or utters a phrase that is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.
Absolutely true. And paradoxically, they may fully understand that the phrase is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile and yet know the benefit of holding the belief anyway.
Feynman has a comment in one of his two autobiographies where he describes an argument with an artist friend — about, I think, the beauty of a rose. His friend believed that "dissecting" the rose, breaking it down to its biological components chemical processes, took away from the beauty of the rose.
Feynman disagreed — couldn't understand how knowing more about the thing could possibly take away from it.
It was the one thing I read from him where I disagreed with him. It seems strange to me he didn't see naivety, wonder as things someone might cherish. Those are things that you are in danger of losing when you come to know too much.
I'm probably belaboring my point, but I remember when I was in my 20's pointing out to my girlfriend at the time some of the more well known constellations in the night sky. They were not well know to her. I'd try to point to a star, point to another — "There, that's Scorpio. You can see the one reddish star, Aldebaran in the center..."
No, she could not see it. Christ, like Orion, I can't look up at the night sky in winter and not see it. What does she see in the sky at night?
Oh, that's right, an amazing jumble of mysterious points of light — like I used to as a young boy.
Funny when I later came across "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer".
I finally put my whiteboard back up that’s been down since before Covid. It still had scribblings of a novel merge sort with lower space overhead that turned out to be an artifact of non-representative sample inputs. As Bletchley Park taught us, humans are terrible at randomness.
No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is ferromagnetic like mine). The ones that come closest, that money is better spent on something else.
Typically you merge a block A and block B into a new block C that has the same length as A + B. I thought I saw a way to use a few extra pointers and some swap operations to turn A and B into C by chipping away at their left ends, and still being a stable sort. The examples I came up with worked and confirmation bias took over. But in real data there were combinations of runs that broke the algorithm.
Feynman was a huge proponent of, whether he knew it or not, compression being a form of modeling.
He thought everything settled about physics should be teachable in the freshmen introductory series, and if he couldn’t make it fit that meant we didn’t really understand it yet.
I personally like the idea of upper level classes being about things we are still working out. That feels more like preparing people for the real world, where your job is to figure stuff out they couldn’t teach you in class because you and your coworkers are going to write the “book”. Or at least make money because not enough people have figured “it” out to make it cheap.
You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series.
I think you are describing undergrad vs graduate, not intro vs upper level, and even that is optimistic.
Even tenured professors are still learning new things about what is already known to the world at large.
Modern physics has actually done it quite well. This is because the core of many physics concepts revolve around general principles which can be taught directly or by example. A modern undergraduate education in classical mechanics teaches concepts around symmetry and energy that generalize to other areas in physics (for instance, the notion of a potential well giving rise to bound states reappears several times in different problem domains). A modern undergraduate optics education generalizes enough that students should readily understand concepts like evanescent waves and acousto-optical modulation.
It's only when one moves away from these principles to something more subtle or less well-understood that the education becomes hairier. But as these are further characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau & Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly available to the advanced undergraduate due to better compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.
> You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series.
Reductionism can lead to simplification, which will take less time to teach and learn.
Take planetary orbits as an example. There was a time when people would have spent a lot of time learning about all the complicated movements the planets make through the sky, "spheres within spheres", retrograde movement and so on. These days we teach Newton's laws of gravity and a heliocentric model (both of general application). The motion of the planets then pops out almost for "free".
I suspect one can. This is because "progress" is pretty much never in a straight line from New York to San Francisco. It meanders all over the place, in circles, around the horn a few times, bumping into Africa, until it eventually blunders into San Francisco.
Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.
It doesn't strike me as likely that Feynman would have written this with sarcasm behind it. Maybe someone knows the details better. Personally, I think it looks more like the sort of goal that you aim for even it's not literally possible. "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
I read it with a different (epistemic) emphasis… I don't need to know the solution if I know how to solve it. I've never produced a chip before, but I know how the problem has been solved by others. And therefore if I break it down, I could solve it myself.
It's also possible that he meant every problem in your domain. That would be slightly more reasonable, and something I could agree with.
"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics. The YouTuber, an obsessed physicist who had spent months reading all Feynman books, provides a critical analysis and explains the cultural impact of "Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman!"
It's easy to dunk on someone unable to defend themselves.
Some basic sanity checks:
Personally recruited onto the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer in 1943.
Feynman Diagrams, fundamental to QM and became popular in the early 50s.
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom lecture was given in 1959.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics were recorded at Caltech between 1961-1964 and became famous throughout the field shortly after.
Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics shared with Schwinger and Tomonaga in 1965
Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine Collection came out in 1983
Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman released in 1985.
Any Physics Professor on earth would give both their legs to have the career Feynman did before he was supposedly only made relevant by his Biography.
It's not a critique of his work (although to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century). Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.
> you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein
Yes, you do--it's just that the mythbuilding builds on different aspects of their personalities.
Mythbuilding around Einstein made him out to be the physics outsider who came in and revolutionized physics--or, in the somewhat less outlandish (but still outlandish) version, the kid who flunked all his physics classes in school and then revolutionized physics. Neither is anywhere near the truth. Einstein was an expert in the physics he ended up overthrowing. The reason he did badly in school was that school was not teaching the actual cutting edge physics that Einstein was interested in--and was finding out about from other sources, pursued on his own. And even then, he didn't flunk out of school; when he published his landmark 1905 papers, he was about to be awarded his doctorate in physics, and it wasn't too long after that that he left the patent office and became a professional academic.
Mythbuilding around Hawking made him out to be the genius who, despite his severe physical disability, could see through all the complexities and find the simple answers to fundamental questions that will lead us to a theory of everything and the end of physics. (This mythmaking, btw, was not infrequently purveyed by Hawking himself.) That story conveniently forgets the fact that none of those simple answers he gave have any experimental confirmation, and aren't likely to get any any time soon. He did propose some groundbreaking ideas, but none of them are about things we actually observe, or have any hope of observing in the foreseeable future. And the biggest breakthrough idea he's associated with, black hole entropy and black hole thermodynamics, arguably wasn't his, it was Bekenstein's; Hawking initially rejected Bekenstein's arguments for black hole entropy.
The myth is not "Einstein did badly in school, but for that reason not this one". "Einstein did badly in school" is a myth, period. Einstein excelled in school.
> Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
He's the only one who left behind a model for how to go about emulating him.
Hawking and Einstein left behind their work but nothing I'm aware of teaching others how to do comparable work.
Sounds like you went to a pretty unusual school? It definitely wasn't on my reading list during a similar time period. But it seems like your doing a lot of selection bias here. People interested in become Physicists inevitably hear about him and the sample of people active on HN is wildly different from the general public.
Without the 20th century restriction, she rants against the list "Einstein. Newton. Feynman."
She says, "The list should be: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. The answer is Maxwell, if you're making this list, right? James Clerk Maxwell, his complete theory of electrodynamics, the best, most important thing to come out of the 1800s in physics. It's Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, okay? Like Feynman is great, but he's not up there. But in popular culture he is, because he's famous for being a famous physicist instead of being famous for his physics, which also, don't get me wrong, he did a lot of really good physics. I just think it's kind of weird."
I would agree that Maxwell belongs above Feynman if we're talking about modern physicists and not limiting ourselves to the 20th century.
What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he was using. Our modern notation, IIRC, is due to Heaviside, and was a huge improvement.
I'd put Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and Dirac ahead of Feynman. I'm not so sure about the others; not that they weren't world class physicists, but so was Feynman.
If we're limiting to work actually done in the 20th century, yes, I agree Planck might not qualify because of the century boundary. And we also get to split hairs over whether 1900, when Planck published his quantum hypothesis, is in the 20th century or the 19th. :-)
Einstein for sure. For the rest: I'm not sure that they're clearly ahead of Feynman. I'm not sure they're behind, either. To me, they seem to kind of be in a cluster.
Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mann are probably greater.
To be clear that YouTube video is not really a critique of Richard Feynman, especially not his scientific career, it's a critique of people who knew him writing books and making content using his name and making money off it as if it came directly from him. It also critiques some of his behavior around interactions with students or telling what amounts to tall tales or standup comedy jokes and then other people taking it as gospel. Richard Feynman did not write the book "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". And some of the content in that book seems like it may greatly exaggerated or even be completely fabricated. And Feynman was not alive to see much of what was published in his name or using his name.
Without having watched the videos, to say that people made content using his name and made money off of it without Feynman knowing is disingenuous. Ralph Leighton recorded the conversations as Feynman was struggling with cancer. There are even portions of those recordings out in the web [1]. Feynman was fully aware of the books because there was apparently a scandal where Murray Gell-mann threatened to sue Feynamn and Leighton because of some mischaracterization. Feynman was apparently hurt and issued a correction in the subsequent version of the book [2]. So it seems that he was FULLY AWARE and actively endorsed the book.
"Surely you're joking Mr Feynman" was not written my Feynman and contained obviously fabricated stories. The fact that he was aware of this is more a point against his character than for it, no?(And says nothing of his scientific prowess)
You should watch the video. People who are not Ralph Leighton published books about Feynman posthumously without his knowledge and made money off of it.
It's also easy to dunk on someone without watching their content. You should probably watch the video if you want to dunk on it. It does not dunk on his physics. It's extremely thoroughly researched and it's about "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" which is specifically about the legacy of anecdotes about his personality, and is different from the actual physics legacy of Richard Feynman, and it is extremely clear on this point.
Was it accurate or not? Who cares if the presentstion was to your liking? The question is whether or not its claims are accurate. You sound like the Feynman Bros she talks about.
You can add to the list, "Putnam Fellow." And, not only was he a fellow, he apparently trounced the scores of the other 4 fellows:
"Anyway, I was among the first five. I have since found out from
somebody from Canada, where it was scored, who was in the scoring
division—he came to me much later and he told me that it was
astonishing. He said that at this examination, 'Not only were you
one of the five, but the gap between you and the other four was
sensational.' He told me that. I didn’t know that. That may not
be correct, but that’s what I heard."
The video is not about Feynman's actual career. That's actually the point -- the idea of Feynman people have in their minds is totally divorced from the actual person and his work.
A lot of the comments on this post are references to the book "surely you're joking Mr Feynman", which was a collection of stories(with a lot of embellishment) told by Feynman.
That is the "sham legacy of Richard Feynman", the fact that most people remember him for stories and not his work
People still do very much know of him. My mother is the person who introduced me to his book. I was showing some interest in science in school when it was presented to me though. Though he's probably waning from "household name" status he's likely still widely known
He is known for being a bad ass scientists and super slick with the ladies.
Many decades later we say more accurately, he was a bad ass scientist who either sexually harassed or straight up raped most of his female mentees and was generally kinda racist (I mean, so was everyone back then. Still tho) and a general asshole.
I mean I don't really think there is any point in declaring anyone the best scientist ever. But he's firmly in whatever the top tier is when only considering scientific contributions.
The person talking in the video lost me, when she criticized pupils asking about air resistance. Basically that was me, literally, without having known anything about Feynman. I simply asked, because I was interested in how one would calculate that, rather than the boring "use formula from book, plug in values, get result". I wanted to know more. Not because I wanted to "seem smart because I know air exists". That's such very silly take. And in fact there were many people, who would not have even thought about air possibly having an effect on a falling object. Basically she is raving on against curious students. Maybe she is herself not so curious and cannot stand it. Who knows.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Autobiographies.
As Churchill said, "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.
I see. In a strict sense, yes, published books like Surely You're Joking and its sequel, The Feynman Lectures, QED, etc. weren't "written" by Feynman himself.
But the statement "never wrote a book", without a lot of context (which might be in the video or Gleick's biography, but wasn't in the post I responded to), suggests that Feynman didn't create the content that's in the books, but someone else did and Feynman took credit for them. That is emphatically not the case. All of the content of those books is Feynman's. Leighton took Feynman's content, delivered orally, and put it into publishable book form. Certainly not a negligible task, and he deserves credit for it, but it doesn't mean the books aren't Feynman's content. They are. And nobody, certainly not Leighton, ever said otherwise.
I don't think the problem people have is "Richard Feynman didn't produce content"
It's "the content that people interacted with that they formed an opinion on "Richard Feynman" from was actually editorialized and published by other people"
They're not trying to take credit from Feynman, theyre trying to divorce the character of "Feynman" as written by these authors from the real historical person
I LOVE the videos of how Feynman talks about physics and have read and loved many of the books she talked about. But really this whole video is, I think, spot on about them.
All I see is people trying to point out the differences between "Richard Feynman the character" and "Richard Feynman the real person"
"Richard Feynman the character" would talk about how he goes to parties and is able to befuddled people in their native languages that he doesn't speak.
"Richard Feynman the person" was a nobel prize winning physicist
Do his tall tales have to be true for his nobel prize to be valid? Or can he be lying for his ego while still being a good scientist?
Yeah, it's hard not to see some truth in what Murray Gell-Mann said, which is that he spent as much time trying to come up with stories about himself as he did working.
Also while breaking the rules might be fun, lockpicking desks & sending coded messages out of Los Alamos "for fun" is maybe not for the best.
It wasn't for the worst either. Frankly i think it's essential for people to have experience in some mischeviety. Hacker mindset, etc, etc. I've joined a PhD program recently and you can really tell who's never done anything but study.
I would agree. I think at least in some fields a certain cleverness is needed. Mathematics is all about being clever and testing assumptions as an example.
I watched this video and honestly did not find any of her points very compelling.
Her best point is basically her own subjective opinion that Feynman does not belong amongst the greatest physicists of all time like Newton and Einstein. And like yeah I guess that’s sort of true. But most of the video is just stating that Feynman’s fans are weird. Feynman is super popular because he made very impressive contributions to science AND he was charismatic and inspiring. It’s the combination of both and she mostly ignores that.
Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
In any case I’ve found Feynman’s work and life to be inspiring since I was a teenager. He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
Frankly I'm having trouble believing you watched the video if you make the assertion:
> He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
There were multiple points in the presentation on her experience with Feynman fans and why they deserved the Bros title.
* Having an unearned superiority complex while having misogynistic beliefs (6:50->8:23) - followed by examples of personal experiences by the video creator
* Making up stories about him (1:42:XX->1:44:XX)
* Thinking that negging is cool? I realize I already said misogynistic beliefs, but feel like this should be re-iterated (24:20->25:50). The example given about the Feynman and the waitress was particularly rage-inducing to me. I'm picturing my mother or wife in that scenario and some jackass doing that to them.
> Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
This is a mischaracterization of this section of the video. 37:33-> 39:45 for anyone else who wants to make their own judgement. The point was that people watch the clip of Feynman and come out with the wrong/harmful conclusions.
Did you read the book? Some of those are distortions.
Regarding the negging incident, she left out important context in her summary of this part of the book.
Feynman went to a bar where it was clear that some of the women at that bar were intending to use men to get free drinks and food. In the incident he described, a woman asked him to buy three sandwiches and a drink at a diner and then says she has to run to go meet up with a lieutenant (taking the sandwiches with her). His negging, was to ask for her to pay for the sandwiches if she had no intention of staying and eating with him. Basically, not being a pushover.
Secondly, he states right after that in the book, "But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing that."
I also think the incident about lying about whether he was a student while at Cornell was exaggerated. Feynman was 26 at the time and his wife had just died. In the anecdote about the dance, he mentions that some girls asked him if he was a student, and after getting rejected by others at the dance, he says "I don't want to say" and two girls go with him back to his place. But later he confesses, "I didn't want the situation to get so distorted and misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor".
Overall, I don't find strong evidence of the claims that he was a misogynist or abusive to women in the book outside of his frequenting of a strip club, which may be enough for some people, but, I think people don't realize how different people's attitudes were to things like nudity and sex in the 70s and early 80s before AIDs was a thing.
I hadn't read the book fully, but I did coincidentally read that chapter a long time ago. Given the context you provide, I agree that he does not seem to be worse than anyone else given the time period. The problem is when people read about him and try to adopt mid-1900s values in the 2000s - and that's really what the video above about his legacy is about.
(also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even though I've never been)
That YouTuber seems quite bitter, making videos complaining about famous scientists and complaining about people lke Worlfram and Musk who studied physics in school and then became successful in business -- not for being bad businessman or bad people (which some of them may well be), but because she's offended that they say they love physics even though she thinks they don't deserve to.
Elon Musk has a bachelor in science and business, I feel like a PhD scientists is allowed to complain about the media going to Elon Musk for science views rather than scientists
I was a UCLA anesthesiology attending in the 1980s when Feynman came to our OR for an abdominal procedure after having been diagnosed with kidney cancer. I watched as he was wheeled down the hall toward OR 9, our largest, reserved for major complicated operations. As he was wheeled into the room, he clasped his two hands above his head like a prizefighter.
How much of that book do you think is the literal truth and how much do you think was embellished? When I read it my impression is that Feynmann is the kind of storyteller that doesn't let the boring real life details get in the way of a good story. Some of it is completely believable, like the general telling people to never have their safes open when he is around, but others came across as a bit fanciful to me, especially when he started talking about women. I'm guessing every story has at least a grain of truth in it, but I would like to hear perspectives from the other people in the stories.
> When I read it my impression is that Feynmann is the kind of storyteller that doesn't let the boring real life details get in the way of a good story.
Is this not an undesirable trait in non fiction stories?
Recently started to read his book, and was shocked at how much my interpretation of Feynman seems to differ from the frequent praises. Smart and a gifted science communicator, but even these embellished stories told in the most flattering light, he comes across as an egotistical jerk and misogynist. How many female physics majors changed studies after enduring his extremely creepy behavior?
I hope that people who read this book in the future are able to recognize some of his truly toxic traits, and not think that being a jerk is part of his genius like the Steve Jobs mythos.
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops
How many women or other discriminated-against people didn't have the chance to make a difference in the world because of attitudes of people like Feynman?
They don't, and they can't. They don't even know that they can't.
The mathematics mindset and the programming mindset could not be more different.
Writing a mathematical proof is similar to writing everything from scratch each time.
However, and this is a serious affirmation: learning to write mathematical proofs will make anyone a much better developer, because of the changes in the mental processes involved in the creation and expression of ideas.
What? Every mathematical proof is built on top of other proofs, especially when you look at research that is happening today.
Mathematics and Computer Science mindsets are closer than most other pairs of academic streams. There’s a reason why so many universities have their CS departments under their Math Departments.
Quite interesting to see [Hans] Bethe Ansatz on there. I wasn't familiar with it, apparently it started as an Ansatz and Bethe corrected it into a theory. But this all happened more than ten years before Feynman was doing physics.
He was a top-tier scientists but kinda disgraceful in every other aspect of his life. Womanizer is a polite way of saying it, I would choose harsher words. He was also just generally a jerk to the people around him.
And he’s celebrated for his contributions as a scientist and educator, not to ethics or social issues. People don’t disavow Ghandi out of hand because he was anti-vax.
His motto "What I cannot create, I do not understand" has been one of the driving forces in my own quest to understand more about the world around me. A good friend had picked up a corollary which was "What I cannot teach, I do not understand" which I think was quite similar. Definitely one of my heroes.
> "What I cannot teach, I do not understand"
And the corollary to that, from 17th century French writer Nicolas Boileau: "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément." - What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.
I'm french and I have a great memory about that quote. In high school my litterature and physics teachers had a disagreement about it, although I believe they didn't know about each other's point of views. Only us the students did, as they each hand waved great insights about the world with this quote. One was arguing, much like you, about the profound truth there is to it. The other was quick to explain that they perfectly conceived how to ride a bicycle, but like most of us couldn't possibly teach it at a blackboard. I leave it to you to guess which was which :)
I took up social dancing in my 20s, including salsa and Argentinian tango. I think that it is a very good way to experience the difference between being very good at something and being able to teach.
I've been on courses with some people that are clearly exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that, but they make you feel good about learning.
One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked about some high level move being complicated, he said that it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's simpler than it appears.
Literature professor = bike argument?
That's were I put my money, but I could see it going either way.
This can devolve into a definitional argument, but I actually think it's fair to say we don't understand how we ride a bike. We have many abilities and fluencies we don't understand, or only partially understand, in the sense that we can't break them down into pieces easily and transmit the information. That perspective feels more accurate to me than saying I understand how I ride a bike because I can ride a bike, though in common usage the phrase "I understand how to ride a bike" would be perfectly acceptable.
The subtle distinction between the phrase "knows how to" and "understands" hints at the difference here.
We(by which I mean a person who knows how to ride a bike) do understand how to ride a bike. The problem in communicating that is a riding a bike is a skilled act. that is you cant get good at riding a bike by reading about it, and it is very hard to describe a well trained skill, it boils down to "practice a lot" which makes nobody happy.
One of the reasons you can’t get good at riding a bike by reading about it is that we literally don’t understand the mechanics of bike riding. It’s a currently unsolved problem in physics. Google it if you do t believe me!
So I get what you’re saying, but it is maybe not the optimal example.
Even if we could perfectly and accurately explain the mechanics and mathematical representations of riding a bike, it would still be useless knowledge even to the few people capable of understanding it in terms of utility in riding one.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2007.185...
> This conservative non-holonomic system has a seven-dimensional accessible configuration space and three velocity degrees of freedom parametrized by rates of frame lean, steer angle and rear wheel rotation.
I always adore the split between how my brain does things instinctually, but making it arbitrary completely demolishes the 'natural' flow of it. Same with complex ball throwing / bouncing trajectory calculations.
It also immediately makes me angry about how we teach math. When you learn about powers (squares, cubes, roots, etc), these things are just written out as arbitrary concepts instead of displaying them geometrically.
Hell, when I was first taught the Pythagorean theorem, it was just explained by drawing a triangle with A² + B² = C², without also drawing out the related squares of each side. Immediately doing that would instill so much more intuition into the math. In general, mathematical concepts gain so much clarity by doing them geometrically.
MATLAB Code from the authors:
(There's no rider however)
http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
It's not unsolved per se, just a complex topic that resists simple explanations. (see also: what causes lift in an airfoil)
Sibling comment to yours points to a relatively recent (this century) article with a mostly complete theoretical model for bike self-stability. There are other theories though, some more or less developed than others. It turns out to be a fiendishly hard control-theory problem, and at least one aspect is chaotic. Which theory is correct has not, to my knowledge, been definitively determined by experiment. Until it is, I think it is fair to say that it is unsolved.
Unlike lift, which is very well understood but often poorly explained.
> (see also: what causes lift in an airfoil)
That's easy! It pushes air down, and the reaction force is what we call lift!
... now, why it pushes air down... there be many computational fluid dynamics PhDs... though "angle of attack" covers a lot, and the rest is just efficiency tweaks.
Good question for teachers who insist it's the Bernoulli Principle: "But my paper airplane has flat wings and flies just fine!" toss across classroom
Looks like here's an opportunity for a language to express the riding of bikes
Headstart (modelling the non-riding of bikes): http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
That's a great rebuttal. But if the actual claim is "I cannot teach..." It is still consistent. No one is claiming to teach you how to ride a bike or be in a relationship or know when to leave a party. "I cannot teach what I cannot understand" is not the inverse: "I can teach everything I understand".
> What I cannot teach, I do not understand
> What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.
And the other side of the coin to both is a powerful trick to really nail a topic you feel like you have gaps on: get the basics and teach it / explain it to someone; you then have to explain it clearly thus have to fill all the gaps.
Where it gets complicated is that one can know how to do something without being able to explain it to oneself let alone teach it to others.
I'm a native English speaker who, a lifetime ago, moved to Shanghai to teach English to adults. One of my biggest struggles when I first started was explaining to students not just what the correct English should be in a given situation, but why that was the correct English. This had a profound effect on my view of expertise and experts in general.
As someone that speaks English as my second language, the trick of English is to memorize all the exceptions and then accept that the English spelling is just made up to mess with foreigners.
Looking at you, the "b" in debt, that I was pronouncing for a long time growing up and learning a lot of words from reading.
A big one is also "ed" like "jogged". It looks like jog ged, so surely it's pronounced that way. Bahaha, no - gotcha! It's jogd! But we like extra letters and there must be vowels even when completely and absolutely unpronounced. Not sure if this is better or worse than Russian which seems to have no problem with squeezing a half dozen consonants side by side and saying, 'good luck.'
So forgive the pedantry but what was your takeaway?
Exactly correct, but I would say 'Where it gets interesting ...' as opposed to complicated. Like the bike riding comment in a peer to the parent of this comment, there is a difference between 'operating' and 'creating' right? Knowing how to ride a bike tells you nothing about how to design a bike. It is not uncommon in my experience that people mix up these two things all the time.
"We can know more than we can tell."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi's_paradox
He was a life long teacher so if he believed teaching is understanding, he'd have said so.
Making or building is a much deeper level of understanding in real life than teaching would ever be, ergo - those who can't do, teach.
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One my personal trick: imagine that you are magically transported into the 19-th century (or earlier). Can you teach the subject to a well-known scientist of that era?
E.g. if you want to explain radioactivity to somebody from 1860-s, how would you do that? Or for math, how would you explain calculus to Archimedes?
Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?
Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of Africa/Australia, maybe?
Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even begin to explain how to actually engineer it. As far as I'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.
This thought experiment reminds me of Mark Twain's novel "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which the main character is a 19th-century American man transported back to 6th-century Britain. He used his experience in firearms manufacture to introduce modern weapons and had bicycles constructed for the knights to ride around on. I always thought it was pretty farfetched that he'd be able to recreate such complex technology without the aid of modern tools, much less set up factories to manufacture it in pre-industrial times. But it is a bit fun to imagine someone using knowledge of modern technology to pose as a wizard. As Arthur C Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Nate Bargatze has a great standup routine about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X1m16-Jvc&t=204s
> Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time, is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even remotely useful?
That's an interesting topic, and there's a whole community that is interested in this. Mostly for historical and educational reasons.
Surprisingly, there are quite a few things you can reasonably do. You will never be able to build a useful internal combustion engine starting in a pre-industrial time. But you'll be able to introduce the positional decimal notation (took 4000 years to invent!), double-entry bookkeeping, paper making, printing press.
If you know a bit of technology, then you can create water plumbing (just avoid lead), and at least some metalworking.
A similar thing I heard about the amish, is that it is not that they are anti technology, it is that they Don't want technology they can't control, basically if unable to make from raw materials they don't want it.
Now I don't think this is entirely the way things are, I suspect there is a core of truth with a lot of religion and tradition surrounding it. But I have a lot of sympathy for wanting to have the freedom that control over your environment grants you. Personally I would hate to give up my tech. and remain a willing slave to the manufactures.
It's impossible, even for Feynman, to understand how to create everything. In your example the Amish idea of "we" is religious bias — each Amish individual doesn't know how to create everything, they choose to rely only on other Amish, shunning the knowledge of others. "we" can also take on patriotic bias, as in, "we" don't build anything anymore because it's all made in China, thus excluding China from that "we". The fading globalist dream of the 90s was that "we" could include everybody on our little planet.
> "What I cannot teach, I do not understand"
I tend to agree, but teaching another person is also a whole different set of skills from being able to drive something yourself.
One prominent example is the "curse of knowledge"; it may take a lot of practice becoming a beginner to be able to teach for a beginner's perspective in your area of expertise.
God, thank you. I really dislike the old aphorism that if you can't teach something you don't understand it.
Teaching is a whole complicated skill unto itself, especially if one is teaching to beginners. Like (since we're on HN), how easy is it to imagine someone very good at programming but would be a terrible choice as a Comp Sci 101 prof? I'm guessing "very."
The whole idea deeply undermines teachers of all subjects.
I think that “teach” has a different meaning here. There is “understanding something well enough to elaborate it in its entirety” (the technical capacity to teach it) and then there is the former + “and have the skill/talent of being able to explain it to a wide variety of other people from different backgrounds.”
This is even more relevant in the LLM era. LLMs can spit out an answer to a question. But if you cannot understand and assess those claims at a deep level, you are not adding any value to the process.
Love his books!
Although, it seems like he’s getting a bad rep these days. How did that happen?
PS: I’m referring to that video that pops up on top when you google him for example.
He was misogynistic and, by his own admission, did not hold women in high regard. I don’t remember exactly but I think he even admitted that at some point in his life he didn’t believe women could be scientists, or at least not as good as men. I think that by the end of his life he had matured and outgrown this.
He was deeply affected by the death of his first wife. I personally believe that he developed misogynistic traits as a way of self-defense and driven by the pain of her loss. They were deeply in love. His farewell letter to her is so beautiful and touching, and yet so pragmatic, in a way that only Feynman could be.
He is a personal hero but I do understand he was human and as such, a flawed individual like anyone else.
All the first page results of my Google search are positive, except for the one video (not near the top of the results) that has a provocative title but is 2 hours long. I’m not going to watch that. Can you link to the negative stuff you’re seeing?
That is the one I was talking about. Watching the first 5 minutes is enough I think.
I’ve watched 2 Angela Collier videos on him albeit in the background — you’d probably have to watch the whole thing to truly understand the “bad rep” and I can’t speak to how widespread the bad rep is.
My memory is, misogyny, cringey stories that were surely greatly exaggerated and just happen to make Feynman the smartest guy in every room, kind of a jerk in general, divorce due to claimed domestic violence, never did the work of writing a book personally but has the reputation of being a prolific author, his pop appeal makes people elevate him to the very top minds of physics when the work of others was much more impactful.
I thought his phrase was "if you cannot teach/explain it, you do not understand it", and that this version was some late development.
My version of this was realizing at some point "What I can understand, I can control"
Richard Feynman having the quantum Hall effect on his "to learn" list is amazing. I mean, it makes sense, because less than three years before he died the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for its discovery. But it shows that even one of the greatest physicists of his generation had not fully grasped something that is now part of every undergraduate physics degree's standard curriculum and is arguably much less complicated than, say, Feynman's contributions to Quantum Electrodynamics.
Watching the most brilliant professors struggle to convert a word doc to PDF highlights that exact same phenomenon.
Being part of a course doesn't mean the students get enough time to delve as deep or have as deep an understanding of the phenomenon though.
I agree. Someone might be able to understand and reproduce some basic components of the system in the same way I use mathematics effectively, but to say I have an understanding of the fundamentals at any level like Wolfram does.
Yeah, imagine if the undergrads had to write out the underlying proof. When I took physics classes the professors would do things for our exams like assume gravity is 10 ms to give people an easier time with the numbers, and of course the spherical frictionless cow.
I especially liked the pointless masses.
Even the greatest of us are only human.
Also, the way many discoveries are explained in a course is usually very streamlined compared to the papers that present them initially and defend them in detail on a limited number of pages.
There's something rather sad, maybe poignant about it.
It stands there as a testimonial to our brevity on this planet, to all that we will not see, do, understand.
So it goes, I guess.
I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog:
“One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.”
I don't think it's sad at all.
That is the sort of quote which gives psychiatry a bad name. Of course people want (and achieve) things, label-referrent-object wordplay aside, and of course people come to learn things, despite there being an infinite level of skill achievable. Imagine if instead of talking about kung foo they'd said "peeling potatoes", or "crossing the road", or "taking a shower". Same paradoxes around completion, but somehow less mysteriously unmasterable.
I once wanted to learn how to change the oil in my car. I learned, and then I changed the oil in my car. It was never about wanting to want to learn about my car.
Of course, some desires are straightforward. But if every want was just about the thing itself, marketing departments would be out of a job.
That's fine
It shouldn't be expressed as a universal then: "you never really want an object, you only want the wanting"
Sounds like you've got this all buttoned up
After you learnt it, did you keep on feeling good about that forever or did it just fade away into the pile of other things you don't care about anymore while you went on to want to learn new things?
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_petit_a
We don't have much time and it takes too long to get that until there is too little left. The latter is the tragedy.
Confucius — 'We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.'
I almost want to read it as satire. Especially juxtaposed against his death. Because the ideas of "What I cannot create, I do not understand." and "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved" seem profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.
If you are calling Richard Feynman "profoundly unwise" and "endlessly futile", you might need to do a bit more reflection on the grounding for your opinion.
Surely it can be true that a profoundly wise and consistently effective person holds a belief or utters a phrase that is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.
Absolutely true. And paradoxically, they may fully understand that the phrase is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile and yet know the benefit of holding the belief anyway.
Isn't there an implicit "... that you stumbled upon, and found interesting".
And to him (and others like him), that might have been possible.
While for other more ordinary people, it'd be profoundly unwise and endlessly futile, to hope to do that
Feynman has a comment in one of his two autobiographies where he describes an argument with an artist friend — about, I think, the beauty of a rose. His friend believed that "dissecting" the rose, breaking it down to its biological components chemical processes, took away from the beauty of the rose.
Feynman disagreed — couldn't understand how knowing more about the thing could possibly take away from it.
It was the one thing I read from him where I disagreed with him. It seems strange to me he didn't see naivety, wonder as things someone might cherish. Those are things that you are in danger of losing when you come to know too much.
I'm probably belaboring my point, but I remember when I was in my 20's pointing out to my girlfriend at the time some of the more well known constellations in the night sky. They were not well know to her. I'd try to point to a star, point to another — "There, that's Scorpio. You can see the one reddish star, Aldebaran in the center..."
No, she could not see it. Christ, like Orion, I can't look up at the night sky in winter and not see it. What does she see in the sky at night?
Oh, that's right, an amazing jumble of mysterious points of light — like I used to as a young boy.
Funny when I later came across "When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer".
I finally put my whiteboard back up that’s been down since before Covid. It still had scribblings of a novel merge sort with lower space overhead that turned out to be an artifact of non-representative sample inputs. As Bletchley Park taught us, humans are terrible at randomness.
No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is ferromagnetic like mine). The ones that come closest, that money is better spent on something else.
Great! Would you be able to describe the sorting algorithm as a comment here, to open-source it?
Also, if you’d like a free magnet for your whiteboard, I’ll happily send you one from BeWelcome.org;)
Typically you merge a block A and block B into a new block C that has the same length as A + B. I thought I saw a way to use a few extra pointers and some swap operations to turn A and B into C by chipping away at their left ends, and still being a stable sort. The examples I came up with worked and confirmation bias took over. But in real data there were combinations of runs that broke the algorithm.
“Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”
That seems a reasonable goal.
Feynman was a huge proponent of, whether he knew it or not, compression being a form of modeling.
He thought everything settled about physics should be teachable in the freshmen introductory series, and if he couldn’t make it fit that meant we didn’t really understand it yet.
I personally like the idea of upper level classes being about things we are still working out. That feels more like preparing people for the real world, where your job is to figure stuff out they couldn’t teach you in class because you and your coworkers are going to write the “book”. Or at least make money because not enough people have figured “it” out to make it cheap.
You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series.
I think you are describing undergrad vs graduate, not intro vs upper level, and even that is optimistic. Even tenured professors are still learning new things about what is already known to the world at large.
Modern physics has actually done it quite well. This is because the core of many physics concepts revolve around general principles which can be taught directly or by example. A modern undergraduate education in classical mechanics teaches concepts around symmetry and energy that generalize to other areas in physics (for instance, the notion of a potential well giving rise to bound states reappears several times in different problem domains). A modern undergraduate optics education generalizes enough that students should readily understand concepts like evanescent waves and acousto-optical modulation.
It's only when one moves away from these principles to something more subtle or less well-understood that the education becomes hairier. But as these are further characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau & Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly available to the advanced undergraduate due to better compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.
> You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series.
Reductionism can lead to simplification, which will take less time to teach and learn.
Take planetary orbits as an example. There was a time when people would have spent a lot of time learning about all the complicated movements the planets make through the sky, "spheres within spheres", retrograde movement and so on. These days we teach Newton's laws of gravity and a heliocentric model (both of general application). The motion of the planets then pops out almost for "free".
I suspect one can. This is because "progress" is pretty much never in a straight line from New York to San Francisco. It meanders all over the place, in circles, around the horn a few times, bumping into Africa, until it eventually blunders into San Francisco.
Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.
Sounds like Feynman would enjoy LeetCode.
[dead]
By who standard? It seems like an unsolvable problem to know every problem that is actually been solved correctly...
I think he's being sarcastic
It doesn't strike me as likely that Feynman would have written this with sarcasm behind it. Maybe someone knows the details better. Personally, I think it looks more like the sort of goal that you aim for even it's not literally possible. "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
dhosek was being sarcastic, not Feynman
Neither of them were. The quote is saying "practice solving problems on solved problems as much as you can" and dhosek is saying "good idea".
I read it with a different (epistemic) emphasis… I don't need to know the solution if I know how to solve it. I've never produced a chip before, but I know how the problem has been solved by others. And therefore if I break it down, I could solve it myself.
It's also possible that he meant every problem in your domain. That would be slightly more reasonable, and something I could agree with.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is one of my favorite books. We lost him much too soon.
"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics. The YouTuber, an obsessed physicist who had spent months reading all Feynman books, provides a critical analysis and explains the cultural impact of "Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman!"
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
It's easy to dunk on someone unable to defend themselves.
Some basic sanity checks: Personally recruited onto the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer in 1943. Feynman Diagrams, fundamental to QM and became popular in the early 50s. There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom lecture was given in 1959. The Feynman Lectures on Physics were recorded at Caltech between 1961-1964 and became famous throughout the field shortly after. Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics shared with Schwinger and Tomonaga in 1965 Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine Collection came out in 1983 Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman released in 1985.
Any Physics Professor on earth would give both their legs to have the career Feynman did before he was supposedly only made relevant by his Biography.
It's not a critique of his work (although to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century). Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.
> you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein
Yes, you do--it's just that the mythbuilding builds on different aspects of their personalities.
Mythbuilding around Einstein made him out to be the physics outsider who came in and revolutionized physics--or, in the somewhat less outlandish (but still outlandish) version, the kid who flunked all his physics classes in school and then revolutionized physics. Neither is anywhere near the truth. Einstein was an expert in the physics he ended up overthrowing. The reason he did badly in school was that school was not teaching the actual cutting edge physics that Einstein was interested in--and was finding out about from other sources, pursued on his own. And even then, he didn't flunk out of school; when he published his landmark 1905 papers, he was about to be awarded his doctorate in physics, and it wasn't too long after that that he left the patent office and became a professional academic.
Mythbuilding around Hawking made him out to be the genius who, despite his severe physical disability, could see through all the complexities and find the simple answers to fundamental questions that will lead us to a theory of everything and the end of physics. (This mythmaking, btw, was not infrequently purveyed by Hawking himself.) That story conveniently forgets the fact that none of those simple answers he gave have any experimental confirmation, and aren't likely to get any any time soon. He did propose some groundbreaking ideas, but none of them are about things we actually observe, or have any hope of observing in the foreseeable future. And the biggest breakthrough idea he's associated with, black hole entropy and black hole thermodynamics, arguably wasn't his, it was Bekenstein's; Hawking initially rejected Bekenstein's arguments for black hole entropy.
> The reason he did badly in school
The myth is not "Einstein did badly in school, but for that reason not this one". "Einstein did badly in school" is a myth, period. Einstein excelled in school.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/14/science/einstein-revealed...
> Einstein excelled in school.
hotdogscout correctly clarified that I meant university, not grade school. Sorry for the ambiguity on my part.
That user is talking about university, not grade school.
It's undisputable he did badly in university and could not hold himself in academia because of this metric.
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/07/fro...
> Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
He's the only one who left behind a model for how to go about emulating him.
Hawking and Einstein left behind their work but nothing I'm aware of teaching others how to do comparable work.
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is not about how to do physics, and the book was ghostwritten, by a non-physicist.
Sounds like you went to a pretty unusual school? It definitely wasn't on my reading list during a similar time period. But it seems like your doing a lot of selection bias here. People interested in become Physicists inevitably hear about him and the sample of people active on HN is wildly different from the general public.
> to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century
Who would you put in the top 10 ahead of him?
Without the 20th century restriction, she rants against the list "Einstein. Newton. Feynman."
She says, "The list should be: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. The answer is Maxwell, if you're making this list, right? James Clerk Maxwell, his complete theory of electrodynamics, the best, most important thing to come out of the 1800s in physics. It's Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, okay? Like Feynman is great, but he's not up there. But in popular culture he is, because he's famous for being a famous physicist instead of being famous for his physics, which also, don't get me wrong, he did a lot of really good physics. I just think it's kind of weird."
I would agree that Maxwell belongs above Feynman if we're talking about modern physicists and not limiting ourselves to the 20th century.
What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he was using. Our modern notation, IIRC, is due to Heaviside, and was a huge improvement.
Let's see ... Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Bohm, Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Ehrenfest?
I'd put Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and Dirac ahead of Feynman. I'm not so sure about the others; not that they weren't world class physicists, but so was Feynman.
Planck? His greatest achievements were a bit before the 20-th century.
Feynman also became active in physics right at the end of the heroic era. So he's disadvantaged by it.
If we're limiting to work actually done in the 20th century, yes, I agree Planck might not qualify because of the century boundary. And we also get to split hairs over whether 1900, when Planck published his quantum hypothesis, is in the 20th century or the 19th. :-)
Einstein for sure. For the rest: I'm not sure that they're clearly ahead of Feynman. I'm not sure they're behind, either. To me, they seem to kind of be in a cluster.
Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mann are probably greater.
To be clear that YouTube video is not really a critique of Richard Feynman, especially not his scientific career, it's a critique of people who knew him writing books and making content using his name and making money off it as if it came directly from him. It also critiques some of his behavior around interactions with students or telling what amounts to tall tales or standup comedy jokes and then other people taking it as gospel. Richard Feynman did not write the book "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". And some of the content in that book seems like it may greatly exaggerated or even be completely fabricated. And Feynman was not alive to see much of what was published in his name or using his name.
Without having watched the videos, to say that people made content using his name and made money off of it without Feynman knowing is disingenuous. Ralph Leighton recorded the conversations as Feynman was struggling with cancer. There are even portions of those recordings out in the web [1]. Feynman was fully aware of the books because there was apparently a scandal where Murray Gell-mann threatened to sue Feynamn and Leighton because of some mischaracterization. Feynman was apparently hurt and issued a correction in the subsequent version of the book [2]. So it seems that he was FULLY AWARE and actively endorsed the book.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Tapes-Research-Chemist-storie... [2] https://feynman.com/stories/al-seckel-on-feynman/
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
"Surely you're joking Mr Feynman" was not written my Feynman and contained obviously fabricated stories. The fact that he was aware of this is more a point against his character than for it, no?(And says nothing of his scientific prowess)
You should watch the video. People who are not Ralph Leighton published books about Feynman posthumously without his knowledge and made money off of it.
It's also easy to dunk on someone without watching their content. You should probably watch the video if you want to dunk on it. It does not dunk on his physics. It's extremely thoroughly researched and it's about "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" which is specifically about the legacy of anecdotes about his personality, and is different from the actual physics legacy of Richard Feynman, and it is extremely clear on this point.
I watched the video months ago and found it pandering and boring.
Was it accurate or not? Who cares if the presentstion was to your liking? The question is whether or not its claims are accurate. You sound like the Feynman Bros she talks about.
Pandering to whom?
Frankly, I am extremely confident that you only watched a little bit of it.
You can add to the list, "Putnam Fellow." And, not only was he a fellow, he apparently trounced the scores of the other 4 fellows:
https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral...Feynman's grasp of mathematics was astounding
The video is not about Feynman's actual career. That's actually the point -- the idea of Feynman people have in their minds is totally divorced from the actual person and his work.
Maybe true in the early 90s but I don't imagine really anyone in the general public is familiar with him anymore. Physicists know of him.
>is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics.
A lot of the comments on this post are references to the book "surely you're joking Mr Feynman", which was a collection of stories(with a lot of embellishment) told by Feynman.
That is the "sham legacy of Richard Feynman", the fact that most people remember him for stories and not his work
People still do very much know of him. My mother is the person who introduced me to his book. I was showing some interest in science in school when it was presented to me though. Though he's probably waning from "household name" status he's likely still widely known
You should try actually watching the video before writing a manifesto.
He is known for being a bad ass scientists and super slick with the ladies.
Many decades later we say more accurately, he was a bad ass scientist who either sexually harassed or straight up raped most of his female mentees and was generally kinda racist (I mean, so was everyone back then. Still tho) and a general asshole.
I mean I don't really think there is any point in declaring anyone the best scientist ever. But he's firmly in whatever the top tier is when only considering scientific contributions.
The person talking in the video lost me, when she criticized pupils asking about air resistance. Basically that was me, literally, without having known anything about Feynman. I simply asked, because I was interested in how one would calculate that, rather than the boring "use formula from book, plug in values, get result". I wanted to know more. Not because I wanted to "seem smart because I know air exists". That's such very silly take. And in fact there were many people, who would not have even thought about air possibly having an effect on a falling object. Basically she is raving on against curious students. Maybe she is herself not so curious and cannot stand it. Who knows.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Autobiographies.
As Churchill said, "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
Watch the video. Feynman didn't write a single book.
I shouldn't have to watch several hours of video to see what the basis is for such an outlandish-sounding claim.
That's fair - although it's a really great video!
The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.
I see. In a strict sense, yes, published books like Surely You're Joking and its sequel, The Feynman Lectures, QED, etc. weren't "written" by Feynman himself.
But the statement "never wrote a book", without a lot of context (which might be in the video or Gleick's biography, but wasn't in the post I responded to), suggests that Feynman didn't create the content that's in the books, but someone else did and Feynman took credit for them. That is emphatically not the case. All of the content of those books is Feynman's. Leighton took Feynman's content, delivered orally, and put it into publishable book form. Certainly not a negligible task, and he deserves credit for it, but it doesn't mean the books aren't Feynman's content. They are. And nobody, certainly not Leighton, ever said otherwise.
I don't think the problem people have is "Richard Feynman didn't produce content"
It's "the content that people interacted with that they formed an opinion on "Richard Feynman" from was actually editorialized and published by other people"
They're not trying to take credit from Feynman, theyre trying to divorce the character of "Feynman" as written by these authors from the real historical person
"He lived, he died, the rest is anecdote"
Wow. This is very, very good. Thanks.
I LOVE the videos of how Feynman talks about physics and have read and loved many of the books she talked about. But really this whole video is, I think, spot on about them.
And his Nobel Prize, the highest possible acclamation by his peers. The people eager to tear him down seem to overlook that.
Who is trying to "tear him down"?
All I see is people trying to point out the differences between "Richard Feynman the character" and "Richard Feynman the real person"
"Richard Feynman the character" would talk about how he goes to parties and is able to befuddled people in their native languages that he doesn't speak.
"Richard Feynman the person" was a nobel prize winning physicist
Do his tall tales have to be true for his nobel prize to be valid? Or can he be lying for his ego while still being a good scientist?
One minute and thirty seconds into the video: "Amazing Nobel Prize winning physicist"
Yeah, it's hard not to see some truth in what Murray Gell-Mann said, which is that he spent as much time trying to come up with stories about himself as he did working.
Also while breaking the rules might be fun, lockpicking desks & sending coded messages out of Los Alamos "for fun" is maybe not for the best.
It wasn't for the worst either. Frankly i think it's essential for people to have experience in some mischeviety. Hacker mindset, etc, etc. I've joined a PhD program recently and you can really tell who's never done anything but study.
You should read some of the more egregious stories that have been published with his blessing.
It's not just "experience in mischeveity", it's "being a general nuisance, then everyone clapped"
I would agree. I think at least in some fields a certain cleverness is needed. Mathematics is all about being clever and testing assumptions as an example.
Yeah but most PhD programs aren't the Manhattan Project.
And his Nobel Prize, the highest acclamation by his peers that exists. The people eager to tear him down seem to forget that.
[EDIT] Oops, somehow this post appeared twice?
The video is a critical look at the legend of Richard Feynman, not his work. You should watch it.
I watched this video and honestly did not find any of her points very compelling.
Her best point is basically her own subjective opinion that Feynman does not belong amongst the greatest physicists of all time like Newton and Einstein. And like yeah I guess that’s sort of true. But most of the video is just stating that Feynman’s fans are weird. Feynman is super popular because he made very impressive contributions to science AND he was charismatic and inspiring. It’s the combination of both and she mostly ignores that.
Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
In any case I’ve found Feynman’s work and life to be inspiring since I was a teenager. He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
Frankly I'm having trouble believing you watched the video if you make the assertion:
> He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
There were multiple points in the presentation on her experience with Feynman fans and why they deserved the Bros title.
* Having an unearned superiority complex while having misogynistic beliefs (6:50->8:23) - followed by examples of personal experiences by the video creator
* Making up stories about him (1:42:XX->1:44:XX)
* Thinking that negging is cool? I realize I already said misogynistic beliefs, but feel like this should be re-iterated (24:20->25:50). The example given about the Feynman and the waitress was particularly rage-inducing to me. I'm picturing my mother or wife in that scenario and some jackass doing that to them.
> Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
This is a mischaracterization of this section of the video. 37:33-> 39:45 for anyone else who wants to make their own judgement. The point was that people watch the clip of Feynman and come out with the wrong/harmful conclusions.
Did you read the book? Some of those are distortions.
Regarding the negging incident, she left out important context in her summary of this part of the book.
Feynman went to a bar where it was clear that some of the women at that bar were intending to use men to get free drinks and food. In the incident he described, a woman asked him to buy three sandwiches and a drink at a diner and then says she has to run to go meet up with a lieutenant (taking the sandwiches with her). His negging, was to ask for her to pay for the sandwiches if she had no intention of staying and eating with him. Basically, not being a pushover.
Secondly, he states right after that in the book, "But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing that."
I also think the incident about lying about whether he was a student while at Cornell was exaggerated. Feynman was 26 at the time and his wife had just died. In the anecdote about the dance, he mentions that some girls asked him if he was a student, and after getting rejected by others at the dance, he says "I don't want to say" and two girls go with him back to his place. But later he confesses, "I didn't want the situation to get so distorted and misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor".
Overall, I don't find strong evidence of the claims that he was a misogynist or abusive to women in the book outside of his frequenting of a strip club, which may be enough for some people, but, I think people don't realize how different people's attitudes were to things like nudity and sex in the 70s and early 80s before AIDs was a thing.
I hadn't read the book fully, but I did coincidentally read that chapter a long time ago. Given the context you provide, I agree that he does not seem to be worse than anyone else given the time period. The problem is when people read about him and try to adopt mid-1900s values in the 2000s - and that's really what the video above about his legacy is about.
(also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even though I've never been)
That YouTuber seems quite bitter, making videos complaining about famous scientists and complaining about people lke Worlfram and Musk who studied physics in school and then became successful in business -- not for being bad businessman or bad people (which some of them may well be), but because she's offended that they say they love physics even though she thinks they don't deserve to.
Elon Musk has a bachelor in science and business, I feel like a PhD scientists is allowed to complain about the media going to Elon Musk for science views rather than scientists
Someone making a 2h 48 min rant about how a dead, great physicist was "not that great" is oddly the opposite of convincing
That is not all want the video is about.
I was a UCLA anesthesiology attending in the 1980s when Feynman came to our OR for an abdominal procedure after having been diagnosed with kidney cancer. I watched as he was wheeled down the hall toward OR 9, our largest, reserved for major complicated operations. As he was wheeled into the room, he clasped his two hands above his head like a prizefighter.
Seriously? That is so cool that you were there. Sad that we lost him fairly young. Such a legend, I love his work.
How much of that book do you think is the literal truth and how much do you think was embellished? When I read it my impression is that Feynmann is the kind of storyteller that doesn't let the boring real life details get in the way of a good story. Some of it is completely believable, like the general telling people to never have their safes open when he is around, but others came across as a bit fanciful to me, especially when he started talking about women. I'm guessing every story has at least a grain of truth in it, but I would like to hear perspectives from the other people in the stories.
> When I read it my impression is that Feynmann is the kind of storyteller that doesn't let the boring real life details get in the way of a good story.
Is this not an undesirable trait in non fiction stories?
Murray Gelman used to hate him.
Freeman Dyson loved him.
(Both nobel prize winners)
Dyson has won nearly every award other than the Nobel.
It makes me so sad to read opinions like this.
Recently started to read his book, and was shocked at how much my interpretation of Feynman seems to differ from the frequent praises. Smart and a gifted science communicator, but even these embellished stories told in the most flattering light, he comes across as an egotistical jerk and misogynist. How many female physics majors changed studies after enduring his extremely creepy behavior?
I hope that people who read this book in the future are able to recognize some of his truly toxic traits, and not think that being a jerk is part of his genius like the Steve Jobs mythos.
Reminds me of this quote by Stephen Gould
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops
How many women or other discriminated-against people didn't have the chance to make a difference in the world because of attitudes of people like Feynman?
I hate how his books have been censored after his death. Always try to find first editions.
What has been censored in them?
I found this to be illuminating:
https://youtu.be/TwKpj2ISQAc?si=O0qabLdBkmWq3jVX
Instruction manual on negging women from the perspective of an abuser.
> Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.
I wonder how developers nowadays can related to that since -some of them- relate on AI to watch it doing their craft.
They don't, and they can't. They don't even know that they can't.
The mathematics mindset and the programming mindset could not be more different.
Writing a mathematical proof is similar to writing everything from scratch each time.
However, and this is a serious affirmation: learning to write mathematical proofs will make anyone a much better developer, because of the changes in the mental processes involved in the creation and expression of ideas.
What? Every mathematical proof is built on top of other proofs, especially when you look at research that is happening today.
Mathematics and Computer Science mindsets are closer than most other pairs of academic streams. There’s a reason why so many universities have their CS departments under their Math Departments.
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
"Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.”
Quite interesting to see [Hans] Bethe Ansatz on there. I wasn't familiar with it, apparently it started as an Ansatz and Bethe corrected it into a theory. But this all happened more than ten years before Feynman was doing physics.
Does anyone know what the comment is in the top right of the blackboard? "why cant x sort" or something?
Does anyone know if this was his personal blackboard? For example, would've his students seen this blackboard?
They should sell this as a print
He was a con artist with a Nobel Prize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
It's interesting having this video be my introduction to Feynman, then seeing how people talk about his personality.
She brings up points that don't seem easy to dispute, yet all of the comments here seem to be praise for the man outside of just his achievements.
Don't you see? He encoded the driving force of his motivation.
Feynman used his genius to build annihilation. His contemporary from New York, Jonas Salk was a hero. Richard Feynman should be a warning.
I'm sure a lot of people here have already seen this, but for those who haven't I highly recommend you watch this video of Feynman explaining light,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4
He had an amazing ability to make physics fun and entertaining. I could listen to him talk all day.
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Feynman should not be celebrated.
Why? If I recall he was a womanizer but we can admonish his personal choices while celebrating his incredible scientific and pedagogical achievements.
He was a top-tier scientists but kinda disgraceful in every other aspect of his life. Womanizer is a polite way of saying it, I would choose harsher words. He was also just generally a jerk to the people around him.
Think Edison, more than Tesla.
And he’s celebrated for his contributions as a scientist and educator, not to ethics or social issues. People don’t disavow Ghandi out of hand because he was anti-vax.
Knew him well, did you?