The sham legacy of Richard Feynman [video]
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>If you love Richard Feynman you've got to watch this video...
>... where Angela Collier will ruthlessly dissect the mythology he built around himself. You probably won't agree with everything she says, and you may hate some of it, but it will still be thought-provoking.
If a HN post doesn’t catch it won’t catch, it might explode in a month for no real reason.
QED is maybe the best of these. The Character of Physical Law is also good.
But there was one that bugged me even at the time. He talked about an advanced biology class, in which he was unable to participate because he hadn't done any of the required reading. He castigated them for having wasted so much time on things he could look up, like anatomical diagrams.
He expected the entire class to stop while he looked up each and every word they used. They couldn't possibly make any progress under those conditions. Biology students spend a lot of time memorizing stuff so that they can have a common language. There are just a lot of different individual things inside a body.
It doesn't surprise me that a lot more of his stories have some aspect that I missed as a teenager, and don't reflect nearly as well on him in context.