Hacker News Reader

> a scientist who went to MIT for undergrad and Princeton for a Phd, and then taught at Cornell and Caltech

Hmm, you left out his work for the Manhattan Project. I get the impression he learned a lot there from the other people he worked with.

View on HN

That was basically his MO. Learning things and discovering things are really the same thing in the end, and he was good at it. I doubt he ever did anything that didn’t have the possibility of teaching him something new. Even the really mundane things like reviewing textbooks for his local school board, or visiting a high school in Brazil as an invited speaker, he seems to have always approached everything with the goal of learning something. Of course sometimes he only discovered the mundane facts that American textbooks are badly written and the review committees basically never actually read them, but learning was accomplished.

Would Feynman have been better off if instead of doing his undergrad and most of his phd, he had instead dropped out after freshman year to work in the manhattan project? Physics typically requires quite a bit of work and studying to be useful. Perhaps in an alternate universe he dropped out and became an inventor of businessman, but I would highly doubt that Feynman would agree with the stance that dropping out is beneficial for the vast majority of people. Feynman lectures on physics seem more inclined toward study very hard to deeply understand what is happening and building intuition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com