Joan Feynman has died
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> [A] thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK!”
[1] https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of...
From the same extract:
\begin{quote}
“Women can’t do science, because their brains aren’t made for it,” Lucille Feynman declared to her eight-year-old daughter Joan. The news was a huge blow to the little girl’s ambitions which, at the time in 1935, were firmly set on following her brother Richard into a life scientific. “I remember sitting in a chair and weeping,” she recalls.
[...]
The path of Joan’s life would be changed significantly one night when Richard woke her up and told her to get dressed and follow him out into the street. He took her away from the house and the street lights and out onto a wide open golf course nearby with a big dark sky above them. “I can still remember in my mind’s eye the green lights dancing in the sky”, Joan recalls of the flickering northern lights Richard had lead her outside to witness. “He told me that it was an aurora and no one knew what caused it exactly.”
In that moment, she was hooked. And whilst the doubts about a woman’s abilities to undertake a career in science, planted in her by Lucille, remained, Joan’s interest in science continued to be fuelled by Richard’s progress through university. Before he’d left home, her brother had made a deal with her that whilst away at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying for his bachelor’s degree, he would answer any science question that she sent him.
“For quite a while we had a notebook which went back and forth, and he sent me a problem in maths and I sent the answer,” remembers Joan of that time. Then for her fourteenth birthday, he gave her the book ‘Astronomy’ by Robert Horace Baker. “It was a book people studied at college,” she remembers. “And he’d pasted my name in it. I was so excited.”
Somewhat daunted by the advanced level of the book, Joan wrote to Richard to ask how she should read it. He replied that she should start at the beginning and read until she didn’t understand, and then start at the beginning again. And each time she’d get a little further.
“So I did,” says Joan, “and I got a little further each time. And then one day there was a figure in the book of a spectrum and underneath it said ‘the relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms… of Stellar Atmospheres from the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’.” The caption was a revelation to Joan. Cecilia was a woman’s name, and the hyphenated family name indicated she was married. It was proof that a married woman was capable of doing science.
\end{quote}
I also find this little excerpt about how she encouraged scientific thinking in her children inspiring:
> [...] Joan was determined to instil a sense of curiosity and wonder in her own children.
> Her son Charles remembers one occasion when, at the age of about six, he asked her about her job as a scientist. In response Joan handed him a spoon. “Drop it on the table,” she said. Charles let it fall. “Why did it fall? Why didn’t it float up to the ceiling?” asked Joan. It had never occurred to Charles that there was a whyinvolved. “Because of gravity,” she continued. “A spoon will always fall, a hot-air balloon will always rise.” Charles dropped the spoon again and again until she made him stop. The boy had no idea what gravity was, but the idea of “why?” kept rattling around in his head.
This is a great example of what people mean when they say "representation matters". Humans benefit greatly from existence proofs that people similar themselves are capable of doing X.
People often say that others, usually children, require physical similarity (sex, skin colour) to be inspired. This I find very sad and highly contradictory to my own schooling.
I mean all people are broadly similar. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin has been inspirational to me too, but we have little in common physically or socially.
Of course if a I'm wrong people should be up in arms about primary schools not having teachers representative of the broader population - success can be predicted at that point with a high degree of certainty, I gather.
Mothers are only one potential source of erroneous beliefs about one's inability to achieve something based on some personal characteristic. Surely, we should strive to prevent people from spreading these erroneous beliefs. But existence proofs to the contrary are a very effective, scalable counter-measure. We cannot entirely eradicate ignorance, but we can provide innoculations to prevent others from being harmed by it.
> People often say that others, usually children, require physical similarity (sex, skin colour) to be inspired.
Representation is not always about physical similarity. It is equally important (often more) for intangible characteristics like class, sexual orientation, religion, wealth, etc.
> This I find very sad and highly contradictory to my own schooling.
I find it sad too, but reality is that people are different and our experiences are different. These differences are precisely what makes each individual's contributions to society unique and valuable. But those differences are also a source of perceived limitations.
We are primates and learn by mirroring. If you never see a member of your tribe swim across the river, there's probably a good reason (maybe crocodiles) even if you don't see it (they hide under the surface). So we naturally, wisely avoid behaviors that we don't see people like us engaging in.
This is true even when we define our own tribe based on less tangible attributes.
> Of course if a I'm wrong people should be up in arms about primary schools not having teachers representative of the broader population
That only matters to the degree that kids aspire to be teachers. And, fortunately, the average kid gets enough different teachers and there is enough diversity among them that each kid will likely have a teacher at some point that they identify with.
A single existence proof is sufficient to open the door.
Yes, teachers talk a lot about the lack of diversity too. If you spend a little time with some of them you'll find out. The teachers I know around the world genuinely want the best for their kids.
> I also find this little excerpt about how she encouraged scientific thinking in her children inspiring:
I have an almost 5yo daughter that since she was barely 2 started asked "why?" about almost anything. I promised myself that I would never leave a question unanswered, to not hinder/limit her natural curiosity. Let's see how this will turn out!
I'm not sure it has been successful, they never really exhausted my ability to answer but I fear it may have sucked out some of the magic - not having answers might be 'better' to some extent if your aim is to foster curiosity and personal goal fulfillment.
My kids are awesome and definitely have some intrigue; but perhaps endeavour to not provide answers!
Both bits are quite nice.
I love the idea of coming up with endless possibilities, labeling realistic ones and why (important) but enjoying the flights of fancy for what they are too!
"Why yes kiddo, I would love to ride a Rainbow-unicornDragon-with-tentacles to work!"....
Sorry, this isn't directly related to the overall discussion but I got so excited by my thoughts that I wanted to share.
So much fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb6vDACwxWU
Longer version:
Kids are natural scientists, heh.
```
Feynman:
But my father, you see, interested me in patterns at the very beginning, and then later in things, like we would turn over stones and watch the ants carry the little white babies down deeper into the holes. We would look at worms. All the time playing — when we’d go for walks, we’d look at things all the time, and then he’d tell me about things of every kind. The stars, the bugs, geometry things, and so on. He was always telling me interesting things — the way birds fly, the way ocean waves work, or something, you see, the weather. I don’t know why, any more, but there was always talking about the world, from every angle. Not just mathematics or anything like that, but the whole business he was interested in, and he was always telling me things. So he therefore developed somehow, inside me, more or less naturally, an interest in anything rational and scientific.
...
Weiner:
That’s very interesting. Evidently your father’s influence spread.
Feynman:
She said that it was because she would overhear us talking, and then she would ask me things, and I would explain it to her. That’s what she says. It wasn’t so direct in her case.
```
Joan and Richard were born 9 years apart. Richard was more interesting to his father because he was older. Being eighteen, one clearly can understand more than at nine years old.
But throughout the two books, his relationship with his sister, Joan Feynman, was an extremely intriguing once. They were both brilliant, and they both encouraged each other.
I got the impression that he, being the person to refuse authority and conforming with the pre-established, always came back to his sister for an opinion on how to handle "mere humans". And it showed in the second part of his story about the Challenger investigation.
May she rest in piece.
radical idea here: the point of language is for a person to put the ideas from his head into the head of another person. so long as the idea is conveyed, it is successful. piece/peace distinction in spelling only matters when there is a real risk of ambiguity in intended meaning. everyone new what you meant -- so it was OK!
They invented alternate spellings to suit their purposes. Most died out, but a few have stuck with us, like using "thru" for "through."
Couldn't help myself.
Today a PhD student would come up with something like path integrals and would barely be granted a PhD.
Real science and showmanship are different things.
Keep in mind, the Schrödinger equation was published less than 20 years prior to Feynman's PhD.
The diagrams would certainly be criticized today that they are graphical illustration of known expressions, not new and certainly not rigorous.
Also, path integrals were taken right out of Dirac’s so called little paper and Norbert wiener’s papers. Dirac thought they are straightforward but not rigorous and was busy with other stuff anyways. Again today if you propose something like that, it would be rejected on the ground that it’s not rigorous.
"Hackers" of 1990s were just script kiddies by today's standards, because the "bar was low". That doesn't make them any less important as far as contributions go.
All in all, maybe you are right, and maybe he is somewhat of a showman. But perhaps that is what we need more. Someone who masters science but also is human.
I don't mean to say that without her brother she wouldn't have achieved great things. However, I think it's extraordinarily likely that he helped her find a passion that lead her all the way to the forefront of her field.
Fun fact: the new HS2 tunnel boring machine in the UK is named after Cecilia.
> The break was short-lived, as Feynman grew depressed from the drudgery of keeping a home and caring for two small children: In 1962, at the advice of a therapist, she went in search of employment
Imagine how many great minds the world lost to societal rules about women staying home and not having careers. The number of mediocre men who went out into the world when they could have stayed at home while their wife worked is mind boggling and terrible to think about.
Perhaps we may continue to see expansion in gender role freedom.
The human work is always there and the people who do it are often undervalued. Maybe that will change too.
Everyone has right to choose one thing between career & family.
Society should not control each person on this choice.
World not lost nothing on the result choice because invention/research never exists.
You're really grasping at straws looking for things to be outraged by here.
Thank you for concern at my level of outrage but I'll be fine.
> _One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was sort of unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a fatherdaughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (I'm nine years older, so it wasn't so crazy)._
> _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 called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit down and work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester Conference. After feeling uncomfortable and behind, now I was in;_
> _Just then my sister calls from New York: "How about the 9 percent what's happened?" "I've just discovered that there's new data: 7 percent. . ." "Which way?" "I'm trying to find out. I'll call you back." I was so excited that I couldn't think. It's like when you're rushing for an airplane, and you don't know whether you're late or not, and you just can't make it, when somebody says, "It's daylight saving time!" Yes, but which way? You can't think in the excitement._
Can't help but think that has some relevance to programming.
I like to tell people that all learning is pain. It’s a sort of contrarianism that I picked up from Buddhism, I guess, where the first noble truth is that everything is pain.
A more careful restatement: we learn abstractions to organize experience, and we learn them only to the extent that they relieve a painful messiness in our experience. So the failure of the Haskell monad tutorial, to take one particular instance, is the failure of “look this was so hard for me that I must make it easy for others.” Let’s give pain relief before the problem sets in. Only problem is, “no pain no gain”: you needed to experience that messiness and confusion before your brain could find a way to understand the underlying principles and organize it. So someone reads your tutorial and has even less of a clear idea because they now pretend to an abstract knowledge which they do not have any concrete experiences to tie it to.
Caveat: this is how my brain works but I cannot be sure about others’.
You can discourage this by writing code that doesn't just perform the required task, but also makes its theory clear to the reader.
[1] https://webofstories.com/play/joan.feynman/1
[2] https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oO...
RIP.
Edit: See below how she is mentioned.
Update: I went looking for sources in the PDF, I've add them to the parent post. She was mentioned frequently.
I actually even recall this story about the Auroras, but I cannot remember where I've heard it.
I'm sure RF had a healthy ego, but I don't think he can be blamed entirely for this feature of the book.
I'm no expert, so excuse my ignorance: Wasn't the "origin" of auroras know long before her time? I recall reading about Kristian Birkeland's terrella experiment where he demonstrated how the earths magnetic field would "focus" particles from the sun around the poles.
Of course, this does not change the fact that she was a great scientist, and did important discoveries about aroras and astronomy in general.
I believe the opposite. Nature vs nurture thing...
Not saying that encouragement, environment etc. does not play a role, it does.
You are exposed to the right sets of ideas at the right time and your brain through random chance happens to take a particularly fruitful paths to explore the ideas creating an exceptionally useful mental model. You have emotional preconditions that cause you to process this success in a helpful rather than a harmful way. This feeling of success and excitement causes you to spend more time daydreaming about the subject, slowing building a reservoir of powerful and useful mental patterns. Someone can daydream 10-16 hours a day for 14 years, but it is very hard to find someone that can study a subject they don't like for 8 hours a day for 5 years straight. I would argue that studying a subject is less likely to result in new ideas than day dreaming.
Due to having an environment to grow these ideas, not being run over by a car, having the money to pursue schooling, and exploring a field which is undergoing a revolution at the time you could up 'a genius'. Would anyone outside of Academic Physics know Feynman's name, if he entered Physics in 1995 when much of the low hanging fruit had already been harvested?
One could argue that Grothendieck is a counter example to this argument because he grew up in very harsh conditions that for the most part actively suppressed his learning. However I would claim Grothendieck for the luck and timing argument for four reasons:
First the trivial argument, if Grothendieck had starved to death while hiding from the Nazis as a child no one would name him as a genius.
Second, when he started college he was doing very poorly and he almost gave up, but he had mentors and an early success that enabled his later successes. What if he had gotten a cold that stopped him from that early success. It seems likely that given different friendships in college he would have dropped out and never been heard from.
Third, he was very interested in political movements and dedicated much of his life to it. However, he was not particular good at this. If he had an early success in a political tract he wrote, it likely would have led him into an area that he would not have succeeded in as much as Mathematics.
Fourth, French Mathematics at the time was undergoing a revolution because so many of the older Mathematicians had died in WW1 and WW2. This created opportunities for younger Mathematicians to rapidly advance their careers and these younger Mathematicans were critical to Grothendieck not being sidelined.
One rather persistent theme was that he had pretty messed up ways of interacting with women, so the discussion here how he mentored his sister are a welcome further layer of nuance on that point.