Feynman's Nobel Ambition | Hacker News Reader

Feynman's Nobel Ambition

asc.ohio-state.edu

15 pointsbilsbie6 comments

Does Feynman usually write the way he speaks like this? I find it so enjoyable to read.

I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of the book [0] this selection is from.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!

If you'd like something more technical, these two are fun (especially if you read them in order):

  • Feynman Lectures On Computation
  • QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

The first book is a nice way to get started with reversible computation and quantum computing.

He does. You can hear his New York accent all the way through his books.

Feynman was a rare kind of speaker in that he spoke in fully formed sentences, with almost no fillers, backtracking, stuttering, or other things that disrupt verbal flow. If he needed to think, he would just pause for a second or two.

All the books published under his name are edited transcripts of conversations, speeches, and lectures. Aside from scientific papers, he wrote very little that got published.

If you want to watch Feynman speak, the BBC Horizon episode "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981) [1] is fantastic. It includes his famous answer about how magnets work [2].

(There is also a 1999 book with the same name, but I don't remember if it's edited from the same interviews. I wouldn't be surprised, though.)

[1] https://vimeo.com/340695809

[2] https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8?si=ov6eU2pzrsut62Ff

I find Feynman to sound almost rude or irritated at times when he answers questions. But I realized he’s fighting through the challenge of communication. And that might be what I learned most from the magnet question: that science and engineering communication is considerably more complex than one might think. It’s just so easy to hear a question, make twenty assumptions about the question, assume the question asker made the same twenty assumptions, and then to spend 10 minutes talking past each other.

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