Al Seckel on Richard Feynman (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Al Seckel on Richard Feynman (2001)

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The number of people falling and sliding out of chairs in these anecdotes seems surprisingly high.

Then I realized, these are physicists. The chairs are just idealized horizontal frictionless surfaces.

The chair doesn’t change just because the occupant is a physicist.

The reason is because they’re spherical frictionless scientists.

The rose cutting trick is "Shadows", Teller's signature trick. It's not surprising they didn't figure out that one.

The Supernatural Clock *mwah*

Wonderful! Thanks.

You will love this, too: https://anecdotage.com/anecdotes/penn-jillette-small-favor-f...

Anybody have a year for this? archive.org has 2005 as its earliest version but that's just an upper bound.

page source includes

        <meta name="copyright" content="1997-2001 J. Eric Slone">

Ok, I've lowered the upper bound. Thanks!

Was he 10x physicist?

More like a generalist who also happened to be one of the greatest. You can read his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" It adds some characteristic to his flamboyant personality.

"Flamboyant"

https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...

That article is overblown and written like it's trying to take offense.

The first thing they list is Feynman "calling women bitches" in the autobiography, but they leave out the context that it's a thought experiment his friend is proposing to him to try to snap him out of being a loser. He psychs himself up to see bar girls as users and bitches and refuses to follow their script which removes him from the patsy role and lets him reexamine the dynamic. He then says that while this works he didn't use those techniques because he found them distasteful and doesn't refer to women in a derogatory way in the rest of his memoirs.

Apparently his most serious offense was not admitting he was a professor when dating. As long as he wasn't dating students in his faculty I don't see why that's inappropriate at all.

They quote his ex-wife saying he flew into violent rages when interrupted and treat it as if he was violent to her, where the report makes it sound like he threw things around.

Flawed, sure. Enough to warrant having some snarky cancel-culture style takedown written about him and dropped in a passive-aggressive way during every semi-related conversation? Doubtful. There's no evidence, or even coherent suggestion, that he hurt people let alone enjoyed doing so.

I can't go into detail without losing at least 20 bits worth of anonymity, but fwiw this internet rando claims to have personal reasons to agree with the last para.

IMO you have to forgive the young and their ignorance.

If you are too young to have known and talked to someone from the World War 2 generation, you can't know that literally every man in the United States would be cancelled from that generation if judged on modern standards.

Most of the women would be cancelled too though.

The generation before that? Forget sleeping with students, they were perfectly fine with children working long hours in dangerous factories and coal mines.

A person with a brain would almost conclude that society changes and progresses over time. Who would have thought?

I am a huge Gell-Mann fan as well as Feynman and it is a shame we don't have video of those two in conversation.

Gell-Mann has said that Feynman didn't think there was enough evidence for washing your hands after taking a piss.

That level of skepticism is so endearing to me. I think of myself as highly skeptical but that is another level.

there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber

https://www.comesaunter.com/2008/07/mark-kac-on-the-two-kind...

From OP's link:

>What Penrose and many other physicists didn't realize was the reason that accounted for Feynman's quickness on many matters in physics. Feynman thought about some of these areas in great depth and for long periods of time. A topic like quantum gravity would be one that Feynman had spent countless hours thinking about. It wasn't all off the cuff.

This is also beautifully laid out across many examples in Feynman's book. His incredible reasoning abilities were not magic, they would merely appear so to the uninitiated. Like all magic tricks, there was a very reasonable, down to earth explanation behind them. In his case, he was simply a physicist that lived and breathed for his job and for any question you could ask him, there was a good chance that he already spent quite some time pondering it in private.

I’m pretty sure the way people like Feynman “ponder about” things is very different from how normal people (like an average physicist) ponder about things. Probably similar to how we could compare me playing tennis and Roger Federer playing tennis. No matter how much I practice I will not approach that level.

Federer didn't get there alone, btw. He originally wanted to play some other sport (football?) but when he got to the national training centre, somebody there said "you know, you'd make a decent $(SPORT)er, but you'll make an excellent tennis player".

That's what a lot of people believe who don't know how he actually does it. But in his book he describes it pretty well. He doesn't think in different, contrived ways or is somehow able to visualize higher dimensions or whatever. He just spent a lot of time working on problems until he could break them down to easily understandable components. This is like thinking a computer algebra system is wicked smart for being able to solve tricky undergrad integrals. But if you ever learn how it works, it turns out that it's not superhuman at all. It just a huge accumulation of basic knowledge and heuristics - i.e. a result of hard work. For sports this is a bit different, since you will hit genetic limits pretty fast once you approach the top. A 5'5 volleyball player will never be competitive on standard net heights. But from experiments by people like Polgár, we know that e.g. a chess prodigy is mostly about starting early and then keeping motivation and persistence. Some would argue that genetics still play a big role through IQ, but even here Feynman serves as a counter-example: As a student he was denied membership in Mensa for not passing their IQ test. Success is a combination of hard work and luck. It is certainly not "magic." That's just a lazy fallback and rationalization used by people for things they do not understand.

It’s not just “people who don’t know how he actually does it”, it’s people who themselves are distinguished physicists (like Mark Kac in my quote) - they call Feynman “a magician“.

There have been a lot of smart people who work hard at physics. Most achieve some degree of success, but very few reach the genius level. I agree luck is important (being born in the right family, having right teachers in school, etc), but the main ingredient is a raw talent. Again, no amount of luck and hard work would turn you into a genius if you weren’t born with the necessary mental capacity.

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