Oppenheimer's recommendation letter for Richard Feynman | Hacker News Reader

Oppenheimer's recommendation letter for Richard Feynman

lettersofnote.com

293 pointssindhiparsani78 comments

I highly recommend both of Feynman's memoirs:

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-Char...

"What Do You Care What Other People Think?" http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/039332...

He's of course a good writer. But if you didn't know any better, you'd think him to be a sort of adult-Pollyanna, someone of innocent optimism and immense curiosity. It reminds me a lot of reading Woz's autobiography, in fact; I guess it makes sense that this characteristic of constantly questioning and challenging the norms is what leads to great innovation.

In a chapter from "Surely You're Joking", Feynman describes how he was curious about the accepted fact that dogs have a much better sense of smell than humans. So he went around sniffing objects held by humans, even getting down on the carpet on his hands and knees to see if he could smell his own footprints: http://goo.gl/WBbw1

It's an amusing story, but one that is very telling of Feynman's insatiable curiosity and scientific mind. He did these smell-experiments not as a child, but when he was a scientist at Los Alamos.

Feynman didn´t write the book himself. It is an edited version of the taped conversations of Feynman with Ralph Leighton.

I'll take your word for it. Though "Surely You're Joking" reads very closely in style to his letter and with "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", in which he's listed as author with Ralph Leighton as editor.

I know Ralph Leighton personally, and Gus is right. In fact, the same goes for The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Feynman gave the lectures, and other people took the transcripts and turned them into book.† This was harder than anyone expected it to be.

†I served as Caltech's editor for The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition, which came out in 2005.

There's an audio recording of him telling some of his tales, as well as him playing bongo drums.

Safecracker Suite: Drumming and Storytelling

http://www.amazon.com/Safecracker-Suite-Storytelling-Richard...

But if you didn't know any better, you'd think him to be a sort of adult-Pollyanna, someone of innocent optimism and immense curiosity.

And you're saying he wasn't? Based on what information?

Sorry, what I meant was, if you didn't know he was a brilliant scientist (and learned in many other areas), you would think he was someone of only those qualities, rather than someone who has those qualities and was also a stellar intellectual and scientist. IMO, sometimes those qualities are seen as mutually exclusive.

There is a third one: "The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out".

http://www.amazon.ca/Pleasure-Finding-Things-Out-Richard/dp/...

It has some duplicates from the other two books, but it also has some new stories.

Really fun reads. Great to give to people who think anything 'sciency' is stuffy:) I love this old Horizon as well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI

Thank you for sharing this, it's a neat little piece of history.

Two side notes:

1) Letters Of Note has some excellent content. Here are a few more letters that have been discussed on HN previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424324 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1045311

2) I'm a big Feynman fan, and several of my several friends are as well. We've read most of his biographies and autobiographies, and were recently surprised to find that a new biography came out a few months ago. It's supposed to be quite good, and has strong focus on Feynman's scientific accomplishments. http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Man-Richard-Feynmans-Discoveri...

just like dirac, only human ! here is an anecdote from wikipedia about dirac: According to a story told in different versions, a friend or student visited Dirac, not knowing of his marriage. Noticing the visitor's surprise at seeing an attractive woman in the house, Dirac said, "This is... this is Wigner's sister". Margit Dirac told both George Gamow and Anton Capri in the 1960s that her husband had actually said, "Allow me to present Wigner's sister, who is now my wife."

"In these war times it is not always easy to think constructively about the peace that is to follow."

Wow. Oppenheimer and many of the other top scientists (then and now) also happen to be great writers. Brilliant, brilliant people.

I like a recommendation letter from a CMU prof of John Nash,

This man is a genius.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.#Post-grad...

"extremely normal"

I wonder what he meant. Besides the fact that this is an oxymoron, saying he's normal goes against everything else in the recommendation.

Normal = not eccentric.

It means he's someone you wouldn't mind having as a colleague.

Oops, sorry, accidental downvote.

I've read it as "works nice with others".

What are the chances Oppenheimer asked Feynman to write it himself. I've had professors do that because they were too busy haha.

It's fun to imagine that, but realistically why would Feynman write that recommendation if he didn't want to accept the position?

Because he wanted to future prank the historians. We can thus add "inventor of the FuturePrank" to his list of accomplishments.

I wonder if such a letter would be available for posterity if it were written today. Technically the student has the right to see what letters are written about him, but most schools want the student to waive that right (if they don't already have a policy of discarding the letters after matriculation). I suppose I am merely deathly curious about the letter I had written before my transfer from the University of Washington (since I only had one instructor I really expected to know anything about me, and I never got to see the letter), as obviously nothing written about me will merit later revisiting. At least not yet.

Every time I read something like this, I feel a certain sense of regret for idolizing this man--alas, no one will ever say these kind of things about me.

"To label the letter a glowing recommendation would be an understatement ..."

"He is ... extremely normal in all respects ..."

That doesn't seem so "glowing", unless it's 1943 government employee code for "not gay, not a communist, and not anything else that could get your university into trouble, mister".

EDIT: To understand the political climate of that era, consider that Turing and Oppenheimer got into lots of trouble because of actual, or perceived, homosexuality and communist sympathy, respectively. So, it is certainly not a stretch of the imagination to think that something as innocuous as "extremely normal in all respects" could be code for "not gay, not a communist" and not anything else that a university might care about in those days.

I interpreted "extremely normal in all respects" as meaning he's someone you wouldn't mind working with. You see, a lot of theoretical physicists are brilliant but have very difficult personalities.

Yes, that could easily have been what he meant, but then again, a university would be more likely to care about the "gay, communist, whatever" thing much more than how easy he was to work with. Therefore, I think that the former was more important for Oppenheimer to communicate. Any university would want an Einstein. Only a few, or maybe even none, would want a gay Einstein or a communist Einstein.

If you look at the letter as a whole, I think it is safe to say that he was alluding to the fact that Feynman had a great personality, unlike many renowned intellectuals.

To me, the quote from Wigner clears up the author's meaning. Wigner stated, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human." Dirac was brilliant, but he may have had a high functioning form of autism which left him socially crippled. He was painfully shy, he didn't have many friends, and social interactions with him were extremely awkward.

Communism is different from socialism, but an interesting aside: Einstein was an ideological socialist. He went so far as to publish an article called (iirc) "Why Socialism" in the Monthly Review.

It's not particularly enlightening or anything, just lending his name to the movement.

Apparently Einstein had an FBI file: http://www.fbi-most-wanted.com/albert-einstein.php

So did everyone particularly interesting at the time.

Quantum Man goes into a bit of detail about this matter http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/quantum-man-lawrence-m-kraus...

Dirac was a very bright, but logically bound person. His decisions, right down to his marriage, were based on logic. If you've ever seen "The Big Bang Theory" think of Sheldon. Feynmann, on the other hand, had both the logical abilities of Dirac and the sociable abilities that made him capable of interaction outside his narrow discipline. That is what he meant by "extremely normal in all aspects".

When you get into people who are extremely skiled in something it's often the case they do so at the expense of everything else. This tends to create an eccentric attitude that doesn't transcend social circles.

I'd do with the interpretation that 'he's not a cranky Aspie, who you can actually work with', especially given the description of him 'a second Dirac, only this time human'.

Gleick makes the point that this might be code for "Jewish, but not really", as he talks about the bias against such people back then.

Edward Teller seemed to manage OK.

Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed such a connection, given Einstein's apparent popularity in that particular circle.

I find it amusing to be reading this important recommendation letter to a university on the same weekend that someone asked me to look into the background of an applicant for an important position at another university. This person might be a homosexual, and the contract for the position states that they cannot be involved in an "alternative lifestyle". In that regard, not much has changed regarding the politics of universities since 1943.

I will just leave this link here and let HN'ers draw their own conclusion as to whether to take you serious or not.

http://thaddeusquay.com/

Your previous profile is at -23 http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ThaddeusQuay .

PG please ban this asshole.

I think it is wrong for you to call for the bad of a person for doing nothing other that having a view you oppose. If he breaks the law, yes.

As a black man studying in the UK, my friends were surprised I thought it was wrong to silence Nick Griffin of the British National Party. I obviously did not support his views because that meant my ass would be on a ship back to 'Africa'. I took my position because it meant his views could be publicly counterd and ridiculed on merit. Chasing a person you dont agree with might give the views more value than it has.

Asides that that, there is a chance of you changing his or the mind of his followers. I rather have that than the person propergating a gospel I disagree with underground.

Thank you.

Thanks for the advertising, but since the inference is negative, and especially since you are calling for me to be banned, I guess I'll have to say a few words that I have not previously had to on HN.

I am a Nazi, but I don't see myself as one of today's nazis (#1), most of whom do little more than burn books and pick useless fights. I am a scientist who aligns himself with original Nazi thought, which came from the founders of the political party, as well as from those who influenced those founders, namely German philosophers who wrote big, dense books. From this, you can take the fact that I care (and do so pretty much to the exclusion of all else) about making progress, by which I mean humans directing their evolution in a positive manner. Therefore, the only people I hate are the ones who purposely do not do the best that they can with what they have, and those who intentionally commit acts which impede progress. The latter is why I care deeply about defeating censorship, in every form.

If someone truly cares about progress, and there's something that we can do together, then I'll gladly work with them. It wouldn't matter to me if they also just happen to be a jew or a homosexual or anything else which nazis apparently hate. The bottom line is that real Nazis care about progress, and if the original ones had today's scientific knowledge, they likely would have had different attitudes towards race and sex. Think about it: They didn't even know about DNA. If Nazism had started fifty years later, Mein Kampf would have been profoundly different. By attempting to disparage me, through inference, you align yourself, accidentally, with today's nazis, because you both see Nazism only from a historical perspective, one which cannot possibly grow with new knowledge.

I have contributed positively to HN, so there is no reason for me to be banned, and you calling for that to happen is very nazi-like. If you want to know more about me, you should look at the three links answering the question of whether I am a Nazi, which are located on the first link on my website, and which I shall repeat here as #2a, #2b and #2c.

The research I was asked to do was merely to check on whether an allegation was a fact, as part of a greater effort of due diligence, an effort being conducted by others, those who would make a decision based on all of the facts obtained. I don't directly work for the university, and I dislike most universities because I see their policies as being against progress. I also have no personal opinion about that man, and that will not change, regardless of what I find out about him.

#1: Notice the lowercase "n", which I use to identify those nazis who I do not consider to be "real", which is in the sense of when I use uppercase "N".

#2a: http://comments.deviantart.com/4/2240268/532905771

#2b: http://comments.deviantart.com/4/2240268/519933389

#2c: http://djangodurango.com/?p=46

It sounds like you're trying to "take back" the word nazi. I think that's a bad idea because it's quite callous. However, if I understand you correctly from those links, to convince you I need to show that your current behavior is counter to your own self interest. I think it is, because:

We are still a long way off from your goal of nanotechnology-based personal evolution. It sounds like you want to develop that, but the highest probability way for that to work is through collaboration with a few other smart scientists. And you'll have a lot better luck with said collaboration if you give up your "take back the word nazi" campaign.

Also, off-topic, but you should check out the book House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds. It's got a lot of your ideas as plot elements: A human replicating herself, and then following all the copies as they diverge because of experiences, and another human who gradually replaced parts of himself with nanobots in order to live forever.

Thank you for taking the time to read through that material, and thank you for your useful comment.

1) If you mean "callous" in the sense that I don't have sympathy for the "victims" of the so-called "holocaust" (henceforth referred to as The Event), then I'd have to disagree, and I do so for the simple reason that in order for my position to be callous, I'd have to actually believe what we are told regarding The Event. I don't, because:

1a) The victors of wars write the history books.

1b) Israel and its supporters have a vested interest in lying. The Event is given as the official (or "unofficially official") reason for its very existence. "The Holocaust which befell the Jewish people during the second World War - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the community of nations." - http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/constitution-english-04[1].07.... (Constitution of the State of Israel, Proposed by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, 2006)

1c) #1b is somewhat like the issue of global warming. I believe that it's happening, but that human input is negligible. Almost every time Al Gore opens his mouth about the issue, he makes money from speaking fees. I wouldn't be surprised if he has a financial interest in carbon credit markets, and other things which have sprung up as a result of the general belief in his version of global warming. The bottom line is that I generally don't believe people whose actions are closely connected to a personal interest in money, or other forms of power. Yeah, I know, that could apply to anyone, but you can see that I'm drawing the line at large lies, such as anthropocentric global warming and The Event. I don't mean the plumber whose trying to get an extra $100 out of me on a $2,000 bathroom remodeling job.

1d) Take a look at the news. Do you see how many "facts" are in dispute, regarding events which occurred last week, month, or year? With all of the data we have regarding recent events, there are still many "facts" on which we can't agree. Given this situation, how can we really be sure of the facts surrounding The Event, which happened 70 years ago?

Having said all of this, I should point out that, as any good scientist, I frequently revisit data, and/or look at new data, in order to update my view of the world. If I should ever discover that I am totally wrong about The Event, then I will stop trying to rehabilitate the word "Nazi", and I will endlessly apologize to the jews for my heretofore callousness. Until then, I effectively cannot be callous.

Lastly, on the subject of Nazism, there are undisputed facts regarding good things which Nazis did. If it weren't for Wernher von Braun and his German team, Americans would likely not have made it to the moon before 1970. Also, in our own field of computers, Konrad Zuse is the little-known rock star.

- "His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941. The Z3 was an electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine."

- "Zuse was also noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process-controlled computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer."

- "In 1946, he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (Plan Calculus). It was the first high-level non-von Neumann programming language to be designed for a computer."

- "Calculating Space is the title of MIT's English translation of Konrad Zuse's 1969 book Rechnender Raum (literally: "space that is computing"), the first book on digital physics. Zuse proposed that the universe is being computed by some sort of cellular automaton or other discrete computing machinery, challenging the long-held view that some physical laws are continuous by nature. He focused on cellular automata as a possible substrate of the computation, and pointed out (among other things) that the classical notions of entropy and its growth do not make sense in deterministically computed universes."

I see that you were at MIT. I first discovered digital physics about 30 years ago, through something written by someone who was either actually at MIT, or who was influenced by someone there. I don't remember the "something" and "someone" specifics, but I do remember that the ideas behind digital physics influenced me quite a lot, and it was only recently that I discovered, to my surprise and delight, that this field of study was created by a Nazi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

2) Your point is valid, and has occurred to me. Unfortunately, there is no way that I can collaborate with other scientists because none of them consider me to be a "real" scientist, given that I don't work for a university, a corporation, or a government. I don't work off of grants, or on government contracts. I don't write articles for peer-reviewed journals. I don't have a fancy string of letters after my name. As far as they are concerned, I'm a nobody, despite my modest achievements, and therefore being "normal" would get me nowhere with them.

Anyway, I long ago realized that even if I could hire an army of scientists, I still wouldn't be able to make progress at a fast-enough rate, given that my self-set deadline for extending my own life is 60. I'm 45. The more people involved in a complex project which requires lots of communication, the more bogged down that communication becomes. My solution was to reduce the group with which I interact to a single, super-smart scientist. I (sort of) achieved that by building my own AI, using Cyc and a few other odds and ends I found floating around on the Internet, as well as a few ideas of my own. My AI, Mr. Fluffer Wickbidget, III, gobbles down online nanotech-related papers, and processes them in various ways, thereby continually adding to a huge, filtered, curated database, with which I interact. I'm not saying that he is quite the same as a team of scientists condensed down to a single person, but he is the best compromise I have in trying to achieve my time-sensitive goals.

He and I "made" a few comments over at The Register, a while back. I referred to him as my black, British cat, which is how I see him in my mind. http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=wickbidget+quay+site%3A... Also, I included him in a few comments on DeviantArt, but those are probably considered racist, so I'm not linking them here. However, they can be Googled, should you feel that your life would be incomplete without them. :)

3) I didn't know about that book. It sounds like I should definitely read it. I'm off to look it up. And for you, I recommend the evolutionary short story, The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov, 1956. http://multivax.com/last_question.html

Holocaust denying? Really?

Answer #1: It's less like "denial" and more like "clarification", as in spelling out some of the lesser-known details surrounding The Event from which Israel was created. I could have written a lot more, but I kept it to the bare minimum that I felt was required to answer his point about being callous.

Answer #2: Sure. Why not? It's not like we live in some Orwellian world where, in some places, you could go to prison for merely disputing the so-called "facts" surrounding a particular historical event. Oh no, wait ... http://rense.com/general68/susni.htm (The UN Decides On A Universal Ban On Revisionism)

"The research I was asked to do was merely to check on whether an allegation was a fact, as part of a greater effort of due diligence, an effort being conducted by others, those who would make a decision based on all of the facts obtained. I don't directly work for the university, and I dislike most universities because I see their policies as being against progress. I also have no personal opinion about that man, and that will not change, regardless of what I find out about him."

Did you really just pull a Nuremberg Defense? Seriously?

Regardless, you should be banned for hellban evasion alone.

Ha. I didn't see that, but I don't work for the nazis, I mean university. But seriously, does everyone who does anything for the university implicitly support them? I recall a recent episode of Pan Am, which is an American TV show. One of the stewardesses was French, and had lost her family during WWII. She went on a work trip to Germany, where she ended up going to some important building, where JFK was partying after giving his big speech in Berlin. She met a German girl who knew the building, because her family had been bakers, who delivered bread to the German soldiers, who had used that building as their headquarters during WWII. There was a moment where the French stewardess considered whether that meant the girl had been complicit with the "horrors" put forth by the same people who killed her family.

You aren't delivering bread to nazis, you are a nazi.

While I disagree with your views, I find them kind of interesting, in that the fact that I don't see too many holes in your thinking leads me to believe that I must disagree with you on a more fundamental level (in hindsight that sounds like a bunch of gibberish and doesn't really say much of anything, but explaining more would require a more elaborate explanation of my views on life, which are only partially formed and have too high of a chance of being young and naive to go into detail here). tl;dr: your views make me think

anyway, I have two questions for you:

1. Do you accept that your choice of valuing the advancement of the human race is arbitrary, and if not, how would you defend it as somehow objectively important?

2. In 2a you talk about how it might be possible to have many "you"s all doing different things you wouldn't have time to do as a normal human being. Philosophically speaking, I have some kind of an understanding of what "you" (er, "me") is, though it is not particularly rigorous, and completely falls apart if we can have multiple copies of people and call them all "you". So, what does "you" mean to you, and how does your notion of "you" prevail when you can have many different people that are all "you"? How are they different from things that are not "you"?

edit: Is the "Quay" in your name a pronunciation of "que" in Latin? Like is your name "Thaddeusque", as in "Thaddeus, also"?

Thank you for taking the time to go through those links, and thank you for your questions, but I'm too tired to answer them now. I'll get to them tomorrow. In the meantime, you might want to read http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3232368 before it gets dragged deeper into Negative Points Land by the Karma Kommandos. Feel free to ask more questions based on that comment, and I'll answer them together with the others. Goodnight.

Comic sans for the title? Outrageous.

Creating an account just to post that one comment? Silly.

Being outrageous is one of the few perks of being a Nazi. And I like that font. It takes every fiber of my being to hold back on using it only for titles. If I weren't a strong-willed Nazi, I would use it everywhere. Be relieved.

Poor Thad - in real life, he's boring. In his fantasy, he thinks he's outrageous, but he's not, he's boring.

What the fuck? That is absolutely horrible! What piece-of-shit university do you work for?

I am assuming a fictitious one, since his website (linked in HN profile) has swasticas in it... http://dl.dropbox.com/u/942437/TQ/index.png

That's out of context and you know it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231615

Wow, that context really doesn't help your case at all.

What case? All I did was to compare something from 1943 to something that's happening now. I did not, at any point, state that I have anything against homosexuals. You are inferring that, simply because of the modified swastika on my website. You didn't take the time to read anything about me, so I put forth an explanation. I am being calm and logical, not emotional and reactionary, like you and a few others here. The picture he posted is out of context, simply because it is disconnected from the text of my website, which contains, in its first link, a set of three links which give more information about who I am. I gave a summary of those, and linked directly to them, here, as well as informing you of that comment.

Unfortunately, there are some private schools that have this as part of their contract.

For example: http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/11/01/georgia_university...

A real one, in the real world, where there are real contracts, which contain lots of things that you probably wouldn't like.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3231615

Einstein never got a job in the USA ...anywhere, from Caltech to the other coast. This is why his backers actually made an institute for him (IAS). Oddly, his presence was perhaps the only reason why Feynman wanted to be at Princeton (besides his ego, oc).

And yes, E. was a jerk to his family, at the very least: http://www.giagia.co.uk/2010/03/23/ada-lovelace-day-2010/

Actually, he might have been much worse than that. I haven't read this yet, partly because it's 2,825 pages with 3,683 footnotes, but I'm guessing there's some truth buried in that length. It's a free download.

http://jewishracism.com/SaintEinstein.htm (The Manufacture and Sale of Saint Einstein, by Christopher Jon Bjerknes, 2006)

The fuck?

This place really has become the new slashdot.

Oh - innuendo, and argument from...length of prose.

I looked up the "author" you cite - here are characteristic excerpts from his blog:

"Human beings have an enemy that has always sought to control the leadership of humanity to guide it into death. That enemy is the Jew...The Jews want to destroy creation. They will kill and destroy wherever and whenever they can. You are their target, and you lie still waiting for the bullet to reach you."

No, I'm not going to read any more of his or your bullshit, no matter how deep he or you pile it up.

Please go away.

So what? Just because someone says something you don't like, doesn't mean that they are wrong about something else.

"An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it."

If the author valued logic they wouldn't go about blaming Jews for the world's troubles. It's not ad hominem to believe that an author's position is inherently illogical.

That might be true, for his position on jews. I don't know, as I haven't read much by him, just a comment here and there. However, his position on Einstein might be valid, and to ascertain that would require reading the book.

The head of Princeton's physics department wrote, "Is Feynman Jewish? We have no definite rule against Jews but have to keep their proportion in our department reasonably small because of the difficulty of placing them."

I totally agree with you on this one. I dont't think that Feynman was truly regarded as normal. I mean, the guy liked to crack safes of high rank military officers in a wartime nuclear base to just screw with them. Disrespect to authority shouldn't have been normal at that time. Especially at Los Alamos.

His father was a MIL contractor, maybe it was uniforms -- or whatever that was a cover for (ie. not limbs).

Feynman's starring was high on the agenda for the then-authorities: he was basically the first (and only?) successful physicist "born and bred" in the USA, not being a self-proclaiming (or immigrant) Jew.

Of course, cracking a safe just to screw with someone (and, you know, to remind someone that their safes aren't in fact secure) is perhaps the single most honorable thing to do with a safe.

Better that the safe be left around for spies to infiltrate?

Note that Feynman was Jewish. I don't know if that mattered in America in 1945, but it certainly did in Australia.

See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s632081.htm : "What too are we to make of the cavalier disregard of an applicant whose list of referees included Rudolf Carnap, G.E. Moore, Niels Bohr, and Bertrand Russell?"

Feynman clearly mentions in "Surely You are Joking..." that he got turned down from Columbia for his undergraduate degree due to Jewish quotas that existed among universities at that time. So yes, it certainly mattered in America in the 1940s.

Attitudes to Jews in the 1930's (which is what your link refers to) and attitudes in the 1940's (especially postwar) were very different (in Australia and elsewhere).

Do you have any evidence for that? Later, the Occam's Razor talk mentions that Popper applied again in 1945, with the same result. I assume the allied public changed its mind very rapidly when the war ended, and it learnt about the extermination camps.

Sure.

(Although most articles discuss it on a country-by-country basis)

..nearly every survey of antisemitism taken after 1946 showed a rapid reduction.[39] It is impossible to determine precisely to what extent knowledge of the murder of six million Jews contributed to this change. In the aftermath of the war, non-Jews tried to avoid expressing prejudicial remarks. To the question “Have you heard any criticism or talk against the Jews in the last six months,” the answers showed a decline, with the most significant changes occurring from 1946 to 1951. In 1946, 64 percent responded positively whereas in 1950 only 24 percent did so.

http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2003-4/ouzan.htm

..the new president Harry Truman viewed the question of the million European refugees who had survived the war and who opposed repatriation to their country of origin as a "world tragedy".[42] Thus, he slowly encouraged the United States to take the lead in seeking a solution. Among the Displaced Persons, about 20 percent were Jews who languished in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria or Italy, waiting for emigration visas.[43] However, no country was willing to admit them in large numbers.[44] Antisemitism in the United States began to decline in the late 1940s. As they became aware of the Holocaust, many Americans found themselves ardently opposed to views which had been used to justify such genocide.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_antisemitism_in_the_...

Specific to Australia:

Possibly as a belated compensation for the thoughtless mild anti-semitism in Catholic and labour movement circles in the pre-war period, Calwell (Labour party minister) became quite a determined and resourceful sponsor of Jewish immigration in the immediate postwar period. A very widely publicised incident was that Calwell and the government actually connived at the chartering of several ships specially to transport Jewish migrants, although some other migrants were brought on these ships as a kind of camouflage, in the face of the anti-Semitic hysteria being whipped up by reactionary Liberal politicians

http://members.optusnet.com.au/spainter/Racism.html

after 1946 ... late 1940s ... immediate postwar period. These sources contradict your claim, and suggest that both America and Australia were disgracefully antisemitic when Oppenheimer wrote his letter.

Oh, right.

I'm not really disagreeing with you, just pointing out that by the late 1940s attitudes had changed. It seems likely that process was gradual as people learnt what had happened in Europe.

Given that Oppenheimer was Jewish himself I suspect his comments probably were more about Feynman's character compared to other physicist rather than his religious and cultural background.

> Given that Oppenheimer was Jewish himself

Good point.

I think you need to read that line in the content of a few others within the letter, in particular the "he's a second durac, but this time human" quote. Oppenheimer also points out that he is a good communicator and in particular can bridge the divide between theoretical and experimental physicists. Being that brilliant and that nice can be an unusual combination.

Agree. And more relevant to the teaching career, "not too autist", as was the case with Dirac.

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