The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) | Hacker News Reader

The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)

nybooks.com

89 pointsokfine40 comments

I've heard that Murray Gell-Mann said of this book that "Jim Gleick has written a biography about Feynman's genius in order to illustrate his own". A bit backhanded, perhaps, but it captures the essence well: it's an extraordinary book about an extraordinary person. The best biography I've ever read, along with Skidelsky's one-volume Keynes.

That’s a pretty typical Gell-Mann quote, and I don’t think he meant anything bad about it.

Possibly my favorite biography.

Yes, it's all the way up there. As these coincidenses will sometimes have it, I just dug out my old paperback copy from the basement a few days ago, and looking mightily forward to a reread.

Feynman’s life (and various takes on it) have always been fascinating to me. This is a very, very good book for anyone of an inquisitive nature (technical or otherwise) to read.

This book had such a big impact on me. Really helped fuel my love of science and gave me a sense of the scientific community as a special group of people.

> He joined a fraternity, one of the two that took in Jews.

This was a surprising reminder that things were very different in 1935.

I wonder, is there any group like this today? “One of the two that took in X” for any X seems like an interesting formula for locating outliers, whether good or bad.

A lot of nasty examples come to mind, but it’s hard to know how Jews were regarded at the time. I wonder what the official justification was for denying access to Feynman.

(I’m half Jewish on my father’s side, and I only discovered this by accident a few years ago. So I’ve been trying to research my heritage wherever I can.)

And he only went to MIT as an undergraduate because his first choice Columbia had a "Jew quota" and they had already admitted all the Jews they wanted to for that year. Besides the antisemitism, it's also a reminder that in the 1930s MIT was seen as a good, but not particularly elite school and would be somebody's backup school.

Now that’s fascinating. Thank you. Both that Columbia was as regarded as MIT and that MIT hadn’t achieved its current fame.

It’s odd to realize that I’ve always thought of MIT as MIT, yet (obviously, now) it wasn’t always that way. I wonder what the tipping point was.

Probably WWII, with the American radar research program (not as famous as the Manhattan Project but probably equally or more important) centered there.

Gunsights too. That was how Doc Draper who later pioneered inertial navigation and whose lab designed the Apollo Guidance Computer first made his name. (Draper Labs is no longer formally affiliated with MIT as it was divested during the Vietnam War.)

But WWII was probably a major catalyst in the US to the rise in prominence of all the great science and engineering research universities. (There are actually a lot of inventors from that era like Draper who although they were also theoreticians to some degree one suspects might not fit in with a modern research university faculty.)

> But WWII was probably a major catalyst in the US to the rise in prominence of all the great science and engineering research universities.

That and several other high tech societies in the world were simultaneously set back a decade or more.

MIT was only a few decades old at the time -- having been founded about 75 years prior. Columbia was over twice as old at the time (185 years) and was well-established as a global center of physics research.

It seems to me that the prestige of a university is largely a function of it's age. It takes time to become prestigious in the eyes of the public through word of mouth. If you look now at the research universities that are only about 70 years old or less, they are not taken very seriously and are "backup schools" regardless of the quality of research or instruction going on there. Moreover, some of the prestigious "ivy" schools have fallen off their game and aren't really top tier in any academic fields anymore, yet are still highly regarded by the general public.

Makes me wonder how big a role did the "Jew Quota" or similar discriminatory practices played in holding back the likes of Columbia. Also whether we will see a similar effect over next 50 years with affirmative vs non-affirmative schools.

From an interview[0] with Charles Weiner in 1966 Feynmann reminisces about not wanting to go Princenton and rather staying at MIT after graduating, because “MIT is MIT”, but does so only after being persuaded by one of the professors from MIT. I think he made several remarks of MIT having a high status at the time.

[0] https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral...

Columbia is also in New York, so for Feynman it was one of the major universities closest to him.

I graduated from MIT undergrad a few years ago. There were certainly no restrictions on cultural background in the fraternities, though certain fraternities (and some dorm floors) did have reputations for having disproportionate of people coming from a particular ethnicity (e.g. asian) or heading towards a particular career path (e.g. finance, or medicine). FWIW I almost joined a frat that I would've been a minority in, but I never felt excluded while rushing that or any of the other frats.

There were a ton of membership organizations that, probably even quite a bit later, required one or more members to vouch for you and generally excluded people who didn't fit the generally WASPy mold. (And often male--male only organizations were quite widespread until relatively recently and AFAIK frats--as well as sororities--can be single-sex but mostly based on the fact that some level of living arrangements are OK to restrict one sex or the other.)

Surprisingly, Columbia didn’t accept women until 1983. Like Harvard and Radcliffe, it was affiliated with the all-female Barnard.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/23/nyregion/columbia-plans-t...

A lot of well-known private colleges/universities were single-sex, albeit sometimes with exchange programs/affiliates, until relatively recently and there remain significant single-sex, especially all-women, colleges today. Dartmouth, another Ivy, didn't go co-ed until 1972.

A lot of universities, especially those more focused on science and engineering, that were technically co-ed--even from their start in the 1800s--also didn't have a lot of women for a long time. The percentage of women at MIT was still under 20% in the late seventies.

More recently it would be self-professed gays. A frat might feel the gay might come on to them, or brand the entire frat as gay. The other similarity is there is at least one predominantly gay frat.

These days there is so much gay publicity, that many young people would no longer think this is an issue, as it no is with Black and Jewish members.

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I feel like his womanizing behavior was bad and that it was also somehow wrapped up in his attention seeking and other self promoting drives that made him so well known. I don't think it should be hidden.

Mr Feynman is well known (among other) for his work in the field of quantum electrodynamic theory (for which he won the Nobel price), his diagrams, his lectures and his work in the commission investigating the challenger catastrophe.

Are those the self-promoting drives you refer to?

I assume that the parent commenter was referring to being a good teacher and charismatic lecturer.

When it comes to how we was self promoting, I think it's fair to look at his autobiography (edit: autobiographical anecdotes is probably a better description of the book) (Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman). In which he describes his own redpillish behavior towards women, and brags about how he would troll waitresses by purposely setting up time bomb messes for them to cleanup.

I am really tired of dirt being brought up each time a discussion of a renowned figure is happening. It obviously detracts from the inspiration or immersion people are trying to derive from bringing up those renowned figures. They are intentionally focusing on the positive aspects, and those who are bringing the garbage up are intentionally detracting from it.

You think there's a problem reminding readers that venerated people aren't good role models? Why? Why not strive to be better than them, intentionally moving past their flaws?

I think that attitude would be great, but that isn't what I see happening. There is a widespread movement to cancel basically all famous historical figures, and dismiss the value of their work along with discrediting their personalities. It's frustrating to see, since many of these people were really inspiring to me as a kid, making me want to be a scientist/engineer myself.

How is "womanizing" a concept that makes sense, or has any meaning in modern times?

If I understand correctly, it describes a man that only has casual relationships with women. The implication being that all woman only want long term committed relationships, and any man doing this must be somehow exploiting or tricking the woman.

Nowadays, it is widely accepted that preferring casual relationships is within the range of normal preferences for both men and women- some people prefer it, others don't. If both women and men can choose and prefer consenting casual relationships, the concept that a man can be a "womanizer" seems to be paternalistic and infantizing to women. It also implies some sort of old fashioned 'duty' on the part of a man to essentially marry anyone he dates, even if they realize they are incompatible, and neither has a desire to stay together.

There’s no need to do mental gymnastics around the definition of the word “womanizing” as if all criticisms of Feynman’s behavior can be reduced to that single word and then dismissed by opining over the definition of that single word. In reality, there are a fair number of much more specific claims about his behavior that are not reducible to that single word and can be described without even using that word if one finds it impossible to move past that word.

Go ahead and name these "problematic" claims if you like. It's long since tiresome to see so many historical figures with co much to recommend them being judged through an obsession with their failures to live and think like 21st century human beings of a specific and still very debatable set of morals.

I’m confident you can find the claims in mere minutes if you genuinely haven’t seen them and are interested.

I couldn't. All the accusations are vague to the point of uselessness. What is the convincing claim in your eyes?

I have no inside information and I haven’t done any particularly focused research into any of the claims. I’m only referring to extremely widely known and very easy to find claims that are much more specific than the single word “womanizing.” I’m not trying to convince anyone of their veracity or litigate details of claims on a point by point basis. I just think it’s disingenuous to reduce all such claims to a single or imply that they’re vague or difficult to find.

It's not widely known to me and I found concrete claims difficult to find.

Why are you so shy about simply naming specifics on a subject you claim is widely known and easy to find information on?

They're described in detail in the book reviewed in the link this entire thread is responding to.

Likewise. Vague things that it's absurd to use again and again in any mention of all the enormous contributions that Feynman made to science and an interest in science among younger people. The polarization towards this one specific thing, which in this case also happens to be vague, speaks of a tacitly puritanical need to paint black anyone who somehow decades ago didn't fit just right with a specific notion of modern moral correctness. Laughable idiocy.

Eh, the biography sometimes veers heavily into redpill territory. He has a frank discussion of negging in order to seduce women. I personally think #canceled is far too eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater and if you just cruise through that section with the mentality that he's a product of his time then it's still a fascinating work.

I also personally think that there are multiple parts of the book that have been "spiced up" because that's the kind of personality he has.

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