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.
I think teaching requires not only that you understand how to do something, but also what someone else's incomplete understanding is. You need to address the root cause as to why the other person's understanding is so lacking, like your examle with the tango dancer, instead of pointing out that a move is wrong and not giving the tools to prevent it. There may be many paths to reaching similar understandings, and a teacher needs to be able to tame this sprawling diversity. That's one reason why we don't just get blog posts or films that are exceedingly short, because if everyone could just understand a dry delivery of the core points instead of needing to think through multiple examples and reasons, we wouldn't be so pressed about teaching.
Great insight, it actually aligns with the conversation above: Yes, teaching is its own skill regardless of the subject matter, but to teach you really have to understand the subject matter really well, and isn’t at all related to “doing it well” in some cases.
For example, in film, being a great director requires a deep insight about acting, so they can explain what’s needed from a performance to an actor. A director may know what they need despite being unable to perform it themselves.
All my best teachers were trained as teachers, and weren’t necessarily content experts.
One of the worst teachers I ever had, was a genius Calc II teacher, who was an abusive asshole, and would humiliate students for asking questions he deemed as “stupid.”
Since a significant part of my learning, is asking “stupid” questions, this did not go well for me, and I took an Incomplete. I had a 4.0, to that point.
> “The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.”
From a poster in one of my tech school classrooms.
If you consider professional sports as an example, the best coaches were not the best players and vice versa. The saying "Those who can't do, teach" is such a shallow representation of reality perpetuated by those who can do neither.
I would say that if you can't explain on a blackboard how to ride a bicycle, then that simply means you do not understand how to ride a bicycle. You can do a thing without understanding it. I would guess very few bike riders really understand what all makes the act work even though they all can perform the act.
Maybe no one can learn how to ride a bike purely from a blackboard but that is a seperat issue about physicality.
But the quote is really about understanding, and the forces and effects that go into the act of riding a bike are both understandable and explicable. Anyone who understands them can describe them on a blackboard. So the quote holds water even in the case of riding a bike.
I would say anyway.
Maybe there are other examples and bike riding just wasn't the best example to invalidate the quote.
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.
Sounds like a problem with your early math tutors: especially with geometry, all the examples you bring up have been taught with "what it means".
I mean, squares and cubes are just multiplication by the same factor: I distinctly remember even trapezoid surfaces, pyramid volumes being demonstrated by chopping and piecing parts together.
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".
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.'
Honestly English spelling is the worst at least of Western Europe. Its so bad it that unless you know some IPA and learn the words pronunciation one by one youre misunderstood all the time. Its also imposible to guess with 100% accuracy how a word is said unless being told.
Schwas everywhere randomly (why is it adjust (uhd 'juhst) and not ad 'juhst when we have accept (ak 'sept). In German this is way more consistent.
Diphthongs everywhere, almost no pure monophthongs. Which is a language feature but in written form is also fucked. I tend to have problems with oh vs aa sounds. E.g. poland is pou luhnd and polish is paa lish.
Stress isnt written.
Consonants not only can be spelled differently but also said differently. Gif vs djif, cell vs celt, china vs machine
This makes the language way harder in a high level than it should be if it had had some spelling reform at some point.
Sorry for not using IPA Im on the phone.
There's two pronunciations of 'polish' though: the one you mentioned being what one does to grandmother's candlesticks, and 'pou lish' referring to someone or something from 'pou luhnd'.
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.
> 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.
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.
Given that his sister Joan was an accomplished scientist in her own right, and they got along well, I don't think your comment is accurate.
> “During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”
> “No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”
> I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.”
Personally, I experienced a rude awakening when reading his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". I've read part of his lectures, and heard great things about him in general. So I was extremely surprised when his own collection of anecdotes painted him as kind of a shitty human, in my opinion.
Very much an example of "never meet your heroes" for me.
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.
I haven't watched this particular video, but Angela Collier's channel seems to be unfortunately going the typical way of pop-physicists, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sabine Hossenfelder, etc. - becoming famous for their physics-related content, and then assuming they're an expert at everything because they are physicists, and physics explains everything. It seems to be a rare physicist (possibly Sean Carroll) that's in the public eye, that doesn't succumb to this disease.
The fault lies partly with the viewers and commenters, ascribing a similar level of expertise to their platitudes and ill-informed takes on, for eg. AI, as to their actual field of expertise. But they don't exactly discourage that either, and in some cases lean into it actively. It's at least a hopeful sign that the descent into "physicist disease" isn't especially rapid in Angela's case, physics still being the primary topic on the channel, but it's still disappointing all the same.
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 think there is some huge difference between learning some bleeding edge ideas vs stuff that -for years - has been repackaged, processed, and optimized for being taught and for making exams out of it.
The thing is, most of Feynman's work (in particular the stuff he received the Nobel prize for) has not really made it into undergraduate courses, despite being decades older and going through a lot more repackaging and processing. But the quantum hall effect is so simple by comparison that it is taught in early QM courses. So the key takeaway here is that there were still pretty low hanging fruits in physics two decades after Feynman won the Nobel.
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?
> One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting
...no it's not?
Much of traditional psychoanalysis has been superseded by modern psychotherapy. And I'm not even familiar with that idea being part of psychoanalysis in the first place. (And there are many schools of psychoanalysis that disagree with each other too.)
Quite frankly, it's not a great insight. It's perfectly fine to want something and then get it. Don't worry, you'll want something else afterwards. The idea that you should set your sights on an impossible goal doesn't hold up to the slightest logical scrutiny here. And a lot of people get disillusioned or burned out from trying to achieve impossible things and failing.
Modern psychotherapy is actually about aiming for achievable, realistic goals in your life. It's much more in line with the serenity prayer, in terms of aiming for realism:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It's from a 10+ year-old blog post so I wouldn't expect it to be in line with modern psychotherapy.
It's an insight that has stuck with me since then and seems to strike a chord with others when shared, regardless of whether or not it's "great".
Of course it's fine to want something and then get it. Last night I wanted a Klondike bar so I walked to my freezer and got one. This misses the point entirely.
Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.
I appreciate your point about the serenity prayer, I think there's something relevant there for sure.
> Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.
Right, I think that's what might be striking a chord.
Modern psychotherapy would tell you that you'd picked something thinking it would solve problems that it never would. A classic example is that if you achieved a certain career objective or measure of success, you would feel loved and approved of and worthy. And then when you achieve it, you don't.
The answer is absolutely not to pick a goal you can't achieve. That's completely wrong.
The answer is to understand that career or professional success will not make you feel loved. That if you feel like you have an unmet need for love and approval, you need psychotherapy to understand where that is coming from in terms of your childhood, current relationships, etc.
And then you can reframe your professional or career goals as something else entirely. And when you reach one, you can feel proud and then set another one. You won't have a feeling of emptiness or unfulfillment, because you'd never set unrealistic expectations for what that achievement would provide.
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.
_Eventually_ you can take the straight line, probably. But the process needs time to contract the unnecessary steps. There's still things we haven't completely contracted, is my feeling.
Also, we shouldn't be so quick to throw away the original process of discovery. If our goal is to make scientists that can discover i think it'd be best to expose them to some of the real discovering. Like, the way fermi-dirac statistics is presented typically leaves out the rich process of discovery and understanding that took place, similarly with einsteins field equations. It leads young students into the thought that the big names are great, eldritch gods, completely incomprehensible in their genius. It begins to feel like you could never ever have made the discovery, because what you learned was not the discovery, it was the sum of 70 years since. I felt a great weight lift watching the sean carroll talk about _how_ Einstein made his equations. He explained the logic of each step, the assistance he needed to reach critical points, and generally made it human. I believe it was an RI talk. Then i remember some video about the process to find FD statistics to resolve the ultraviolet catastrophe and it was so enlightening. They aren't old gods, they're people that worked for decades to reach completely reasonable goals and we just don't teach it like that at all. It's incredibly discouraging to new students to never see that these people were mere mortals.
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.
As the video points out, Feynman was telling tall tales to impress a much younger man, Ralph Leighton. Ralph Leighton decided to publish stories that told a specific narrative, that being an asshole was cool, and he omitted more wholesome stories about Feynman being supportive of women.
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.
He developed quantum electrodynamics, the first fully fleshed-out quantum field theory. In the process, the invented the action formulation of quantum field theory, which is absolutely fundamental to the modern understanding of the subject, and he invented the method of solving path integrals perturbatively that everyone has used since (Feynman diagrams).
That easily puts him among the top 10 physicists of the 20th Century.
Beyond his research contributions, he was a highly innovative und unorthodox teacher, and an utterly captivating raconteur. He had a highly unusual combination of skills and personality traits. That's why he's so famous.
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.
Many people write books on interesting subjects posthumously (biographies come to mind). I believe it would be up to the descendants of Feynman to sue if due legal etiquettes were not maintained. Having said that, all famous Feynman books like the Feynman lectures, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Please of finding things out, etc are edited pieces of Feynman's recorded audio, no doubt about that.
Honestly, my problem with the video in question is that its tone unjustly attempts to denigrate Feynman (starting with the clickbaity title itself, a sham legacy? really?) by trying to frame the narrative that his supposed works were not his to begin with. The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all? If this is the central takeaway of the video then I'm honestly glad that I didn't waste precisious few hours of my life on such misleading content. Feel free to correct me though.
To me, Feynman is iconic because of the way he communicates. Of course, there is a disjunction between the man and his ideas and I'm not unwilling to believe that he had some flaws.
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.
Overall seems good, but I find it interesting she says it teaches to always be the smartest person in the room when the book often reflected Feynman as being somewhat simple, going on about reliance on mental tricks in comparison to his colleagues who he felt were much more talented. Or instances where he found himself out of his depth & got lucky (pointing at some random thing on a diagram to figure out what it is without asking, happens to get people he's with to rubber duck debug an actual problem). Which may support her observation of Feynman bros who might find this relatable
This all comes back to the observation I've made working with competent people, which is that we're all stuck trying to solve problems with the computational power of a slab of meat
(she later goes on to address this modesty as being underhanded)
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.
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.
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?
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)
It's misogynistic, because the ghost writer of Surely You're Joking Mr. Feyman!, Ralph Leighton, ultimately put into print narratives that encouraged men to see "ordinary" women as "worthless bitches". In the character of "Feynman":
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
...
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
So it worked even with an ordinary girl!
The story about direct consensual sex with one "ordinary girl" doesn't validate that men should have misogynist attitudes towards ordinary women. It's just confirmation bias. It matters, because training your mind to be misogynist until it's automatic would spill over into other aspects of your life, like how you treat female coworkers.
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?
Most of these complaints about Feynman come down to one story he told. People who come away thinking Feynman is a misogynist generally miss the point of the story. Feynman talks about how when he was young, an older friend told him he could pick up women by being a jerk. He tried it, and it worked, but he felt bad about himself afterwards and decided not to do it any more.
Some people look at that story and say, "Look at what a jerk Feynman was to the lady in the story!" And then they completely ignore the part where Feynman says that even though the method was effective, he didn't feel right using it.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? is the most heavily edited.
Gell-Mann famously threatened to sue Feynman if he didn't alter his book which he did in later printings.
The parts of the Cargo Cult Science chapter that referenced specific scammers were removed out of fear of a defamation lawsuit.
The Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path chapter in which he discusses picking up women at bars was removed after the first edition.
All of Surely You're Joking received a pass to change the language of the book in order to "remove sexist and misogynistic language".
What Do You Care What Other People Think? was also altered to remove his descriptions of his first wife and broadly the language of the book was also updated.
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.
This website is 99% the sort of not especially socialised young men who for various psychological insecurities are prone to the sort of hero-worship that she refers to in the video.
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.
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'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.
For example, in film, being a great director requires a deep insight about acting, so they can explain what’s needed from a performance to an actor. A director may know what they need despite being unable to perform it themselves.
One of the worst teachers I ever had, was a genius Calc II teacher, who was an abusive asshole, and would humiliate students for asking questions he deemed as “stupid.”
Since a significant part of my learning, is asking “stupid” questions, this did not go well for me, and I took an Incomplete. I had a 4.0, to that point.
> “The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.”
From a poster in one of my tech school classrooms.
Maybe no one can learn how to ride a bike purely from a blackboard but that is a seperat issue about physicality.
But the quote is really about understanding, and the forces and effects that go into the act of riding a bike are both understandable and explicable. Anyone who understands them can describe them on a blackboard. So the quote holds water even in the case of riding a bike.
I would say anyway.
Maybe there are other examples and bike riding just wasn't the best example to invalidate the quote.
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.
So I get what you’re saying, but it is maybe not the optimal example.
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.
I mean, squares and cubes are just multiplication by the same factor: I distinctly remember even trapezoid surfaces, pyramid volumes being demonstrated by chopping and piecing parts together.
(There's no rider however)
http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
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
Headstart (modelling the non-riding of bikes): http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
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.
Schwas everywhere randomly (why is it adjust (uhd 'juhst) and not ad 'juhst when we have accept (ak 'sept). In German this is way more consistent. Diphthongs everywhere, almost no pure monophthongs. Which is a language feature but in written form is also fucked. I tend to have problems with oh vs aa sounds. E.g. poland is pou luhnd and polish is paa lish. Stress isnt written. Consonants not only can be spelled differently but also said differently. Gif vs djif, cell vs celt, china vs machine
This makes the language way harder in a high level than it should be if it had had some spelling reform at some point. Sorry for not using IPA Im on the phone.
There's two pronunciations of 'polish' though: the one you mentioned being what one does to grandmother's candlesticks, and 'pou lish' referring to someone or something from 'pou luhnd'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi's_paradox
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> “During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”
> “No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”
> I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.”
http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/04/richard-feynm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman
Very much an example of "never meet your heroes" for me.
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.
The fault lies partly with the viewers and commenters, ascribing a similar level of expertise to their platitudes and ill-informed takes on, for eg. AI, as to their actual field of expertise. But they don't exactly discourage that either, and in some cases lean into it actively. It's at least a hopeful sign that the descent into "physicist disease" isn't especially rapid in Angela's case, physics still being the primary topic on the channel, but it's still disappointing all the same.
Maybe that’s why Angela Collier doesn’t like him? Reminds me of how a lot of astronomers despised Carl Sagan.
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.
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.
“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.
...no it's not?
Much of traditional psychoanalysis has been superseded by modern psychotherapy. And I'm not even familiar with that idea being part of psychoanalysis in the first place. (And there are many schools of psychoanalysis that disagree with each other too.)
Quite frankly, it's not a great insight. It's perfectly fine to want something and then get it. Don't worry, you'll want something else afterwards. The idea that you should set your sights on an impossible goal doesn't hold up to the slightest logical scrutiny here. And a lot of people get disillusioned or burned out from trying to achieve impossible things and failing.
Modern psychotherapy is actually about aiming for achievable, realistic goals in your life. It's much more in line with the serenity prayer, in terms of aiming for realism:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It's an insight that has stuck with me since then and seems to strike a chord with others when shared, regardless of whether or not it's "great".
Of course it's fine to want something and then get it. Last night I wanted a Klondike bar so I walked to my freezer and got one. This misses the point entirely.
Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.
I appreciate your point about the serenity prayer, I think there's something relevant there for sure.
Right, I think that's what might be striking a chord.
Modern psychotherapy would tell you that you'd picked something thinking it would solve problems that it never would. A classic example is that if you achieved a certain career objective or measure of success, you would feel loved and approved of and worthy. And then when you achieve it, you don't.
The answer is absolutely not to pick a goal you can't achieve. That's completely wrong.
The answer is to understand that career or professional success will not make you feel loved. That if you feel like you have an unmet need for love and approval, you need psychotherapy to understand where that is coming from in terms of your childhood, current relationships, etc.
And then you can reframe your professional or career goals as something else entirely. And when you reach one, you can feel proud and then set another one. You won't have a feeling of emptiness or unfulfillment, because you'd never set unrealistic expectations for what that achievement would provide.
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 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".
Do you also find that you enjoy magic tricks less when you know how they're done?
Personally I find the "not knowing" kind of painful. I can't imagine cherishing ignorance.
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.
Also, if you’d like a free magnet for your whiteboard, I’ll happily send you one from BeWelcome.org;)
That seems a reasonable goal.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.
Also, we shouldn't be so quick to throw away the original process of discovery. If our goal is to make scientists that can discover i think it'd be best to expose them to some of the real discovering. Like, the way fermi-dirac statistics is presented typically leaves out the rich process of discovery and understanding that took place, similarly with einsteins field equations. It leads young students into the thought that the big names are great, eldritch gods, completely incomprehensible in their genius. It begins to feel like you could never ever have made the discovery, because what you learned was not the discovery, it was the sum of 70 years since. I felt a great weight lift watching the sean carroll talk about _how_ Einstein made his equations. He explained the logic of each step, the assistance he needed to reach critical points, and generally made it human. I believe it was an RI talk. Then i remember some video about the process to find FD statistics to resolve the ultraviolet catastrophe and it was so enlightening. They aren't old gods, they're people that worked for decades to reach completely reasonable goals and we just don't teach it like that at all. It's incredibly discouraging to new students to never see that these people were mere mortals.
It's also possible that he meant every problem in your domain. That would be slightly more reasonable, and something I could agree with.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/14/science/einstein-revealed...
hotdogscout correctly clarified that I meant university, not grade school. Sorry for the ambiguity on my part.
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...
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.
Who would you put in the top 10 ahead of him?
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."
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.
Feynman also became active in physics right at the end of the heroic era. So he's disadvantaged by it.
That easily puts him among the top 10 physicists of the 20th Century.
Beyond his research contributions, he was a highly innovative und unorthodox teacher, and an utterly captivating raconteur. He had a highly unusual combination of skills and personality traits. That's why he's so famous.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Tapes-Research-Chemist-storie... [2] https://feynman.com/stories/al-seckel-on-feynman/
"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)
Honestly, my problem with the video in question is that its tone unjustly attempts to denigrate Feynman (starting with the clickbaity title itself, a sham legacy? really?) by trying to frame the narrative that his supposed works were not his to begin with. The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all? If this is the central takeaway of the video then I'm honestly glad that I didn't waste precisious few hours of my life on such misleading content. Feel free to correct me though.
To me, Feynman is iconic because of the way he communicates. Of course, there is a disjunction between the man and his ideas and I'm not unwilling to believe that he had some flaws.
Feynman's grasp of mathematics was astounding
>is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics.
That is the "sham legacy of Richard Feynman", the fact that most people remember him for stories and not his work
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.
This all comes back to the observation I've made working with competent people, which is that we're all stuck trying to solve problems with the computational power of a slab of meat
(she later goes on to address this modesty as being underhanded)
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.
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.
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.
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's not just "experience in mischeveity", it's "being a general nuisance, then everyone clapped"
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?
[EDIT] Oops, somehow this post appeared twice?
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”.
> 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.
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.
(also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even though I've never been)
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
...
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
So it worked even with an ordinary girl!
The story about direct consensual sex with one "ordinary girl" doesn't validate that men should have misogynist attitudes towards ordinary women. It's just confirmation bias. It matters, because training your mind to be misogynist until it's automatic would spill over into other aspects of your life, like how you treat female coworkers.
Freeman Dyson loved him.
(Both nobel prize winners)
Is this not an undesirable trait in non fiction stories?
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?
Some people look at that story and say, "Look at what a jerk Feynman was to the lady in the story!" And then they completely ignore the part where Feynman says that even though the method was effective, he didn't feel right using it.
Gell-Mann famously threatened to sue Feynman if he didn't alter his book which he did in later printings.
The parts of the Cargo Cult Science chapter that referenced specific scammers were removed out of fear of a defamation lawsuit.
The Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path chapter in which he discusses picking up women at bars was removed after the first edition.
All of Surely You're Joking received a pass to change the language of the book in order to "remove sexist and misogynistic language".
What Do You Care What Other People Think? was also altered to remove his descriptions of his first wife and broadly the language of the book was also updated.
https://youtu.be/TwKpj2ISQAc?si=O0qabLdBkmWq3jVX
"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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
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.
Think Edison, more than Tesla.