Some basic sanity checks: Personally recruited onto the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer in 1943. Feynman Diagrams, fundamental to QM and became popular in the early 50s. There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom lecture was given in 1959. The Feynman Lectures on Physics were recorded at Caltech between 1961-1964 and became famous throughout the field shortly after. Nobel Prize for the development of Quantum Electrodynamics shared with Schwinger and Tomonaga in 1965 Richard Feynman: Fun to Imagine Collection came out in 1983 Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman released in 1985.
Any Physics Professor on earth would give both their legs to have the career Feynman did before he was supposedly only made relevant by his Biography.
As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.
Yes, you do--it's just that the mythbuilding builds on different aspects of their personalities.
Mythbuilding around Einstein made him out to be the physics outsider who came in and revolutionized physics--or, in the somewhat less outlandish (but still outlandish) version, the kid who flunked all his physics classes in school and then revolutionized physics. Neither is anywhere near the truth. Einstein was an expert in the physics he ended up overthrowing. The reason he did badly in school was that school was not teaching the actual cutting edge physics that Einstein was interested in--and was finding out about from other sources, pursued on his own. And even then, he didn't flunk out of school; when he published his landmark 1905 papers, he was about to be awarded his doctorate in physics, and it wasn't too long after that that he left the patent office and became a professional academic.
Mythbuilding around Hawking made him out to be the genius who, despite his severe physical disability, could see through all the complexities and find the simple answers to fundamental questions that will lead us to a theory of everything and the end of physics. (This mythmaking, btw, was not infrequently purveyed by Hawking himself.) That story conveniently forgets the fact that none of those simple answers he gave have any experimental confirmation, and aren't likely to get any any time soon. He did propose some groundbreaking ideas, but none of them are about things we actually observe, or have any hope of observing in the foreseeable future. And the biggest breakthrough idea he's associated with, black hole entropy and black hole thermodynamics, arguably wasn't his, it was Bekenstein's; Hawking initially rejected Bekenstein's arguments for black hole entropy.
The myth is not "Einstein did badly in school, but for that reason not this one". "Einstein did badly in school" is a myth, period. Einstein excelled in school.
https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/14/science/einstein-revealed...
It's undisputable he did badly in university and could not hold himself in academia because of this metric.
https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2021/07/fro...
hotdogscout correctly clarified that I meant university, not grade school. Sorry for the ambiguity on my part.
He's the only one who left behind a model for how to go about emulating him.
Hawking and Einstein left behind their work but nothing I'm aware of teaching others how to do comparable work.
That easily puts him among the top 10 physicists of the 20th Century.
Beyond his research contributions, he was a highly innovative und unorthodox teacher, and an utterly captivating raconteur. He had a highly unusual combination of skills and personality traits. That's why he's so famous.
Who would you put in the top 10 ahead of him?
She says, "The list should be: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. The answer is Maxwell, if you're making this list, right? James Clerk Maxwell, his complete theory of electrodynamics, the best, most important thing to come out of the 1800s in physics. It's Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, okay? Like Feynman is great, but he's not up there. But in popular culture he is, because he's famous for being a famous physicist instead of being famous for his physics, which also, don't get me wrong, he did a lot of really good physics. I just think it's kind of weird."
What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he was using. Our modern notation, IIRC, is due to Heaviside, and was a huge improvement.
Feynman also became active in physics right at the end of the heroic era. So he's disadvantaged by it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Tapes-Research-Chemist-storie... [2] https://feynman.com/stories/al-seckel-on-feynman/
"Surely you're joking Mr Feynman" was not written my Feynman and contained obviously fabricated stories. The fact that he was aware of this is more a point against his character than for it, no?(And says nothing of his scientific prowess)
Honestly, my problem with the video in question is that its tone unjustly attempts to denigrate Feynman (starting with the clickbaity title itself, a sham legacy? really?) by trying to frame the narrative that his supposed works were not his to begin with. The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all? If this is the central takeaway of the video then I'm honestly glad that I didn't waste precisious few hours of my life on such misleading content. Feel free to correct me though.
To me, Feynman is iconic because of the way he communicates. Of course, there is a disjunction between the man and his ideas and I'm not unwilling to believe that he had some flaws.
The video is not about denigrating Feynman. The "sham" legacy refers not to Feynman's legacy as a physicist, which is undisputed. The "sham" legacy refers to Feynman's false legacy written by other people for personal motivations.
> The comments in that video validate this sentiment to the point that people joke about him not existing at all?
Yes, that's the joke, but you're misunderstanding it. The joke is not punching at Feynman, but about how we know so little about him because we have no written primary sources about his views, only secondary sources.
Might not reply to this anymore, because a lot of these comments are people criticizing the video content they imagine in their heads based on the title only, not having watched the video.
"Anyway, I was among the first five. I have since found out from
somebody from Canada, where it was scored, who was in the scoring
division—he came to me much later and he told me that it was
astonishing. He said that at this examination, 'Not only were you
one of the five, but the gap between you and the other four was
sensational.' He told me that. I didn’t know that. That may not
be correct, but that’s what I heard."
Feynman's grasp of mathematics was astounding
>is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics.
That is the "sham legacy of Richard Feynman", the fact that most people remember him for stories and not his work
Many decades later we say more accurately, he was a bad ass scientist who either sexually harassed or straight up raped most of his female mentees and was generally kinda racist (I mean, so was everyone back then. Still tho) and a general asshole.
I mean I don't really think there is any point in declaring anyone the best scientist ever. But he's firmly in whatever the top tier is when only considering scientific contributions.
As Churchill said, "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself."
The section about 45m in ("The Myth of Richard Feynman) covers it in a hair under seven minutes.
She notices that in the preface to "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", the author says that people have the "mistaken idea" that "Surely You're Joking..." was an autobiography. The preface, which was written from the perspective of the author of the books, is attributed to Ralph Leighton, who has a Wikipedia article about him. It turns out that he wrote the books, years later, based on stories Feynman told him at drumming circles. So it's not exactly a secret, but also not exactly publicized - Leighton's name is nowhere on the book jackets, for instance.
The video goes onto explain that this is the case for anything commonly attributed to him - The Feynman Lectures, for instance, were transcribed/edited/turned into books by Robert B. Leighton (Ralph's father) and Matthew Sands.
She then cites the general "never wrote a book" claim as directly coming from James Gleick's "Genius", which is a well-regarded and fact-checked biography of Feynman.
But the statement "never wrote a book", without a lot of context (which might be in the video or Gleick's biography, but wasn't in the post I responded to), suggests that Feynman didn't create the content that's in the books, but someone else did and Feynman took credit for them. That is emphatically not the case. All of the content of those books is Feynman's. Leighton took Feynman's content, delivered orally, and put it into publishable book form. Certainly not a negligible task, and he deserves credit for it, but it doesn't mean the books aren't Feynman's content. They are. And nobody, certainly not Leighton, ever said otherwise.
It's "the content that people interacted with that they formed an opinion on "Richard Feynman" from was actually editorialized and published by other people"
They're not trying to take credit from Feynman, theyre trying to divorce the character of "Feynman" as written by these authors from the real historical person
So again, I think "never wrote a book" is misleading if it gives the impression that the portrayal of Feynman in such books was not Feynman's own portrayal of himself. It was.
With some more thought, the fact that he wasn't the direct author of any books is interesting but not really that significant to his character, so i can't see much reason to point it out other than to discredit his achievements.
Though if the achievement being discredited is the number of books he's seemingly written then it makes sense to a degree.
Only if you take "written" literally, as in, he didn't do the actual writing, he just told the stories orally and someone else wrote them down.
I personally don't care much about that; the stories are his (including, as I've said, whatever misrepresentations of what actually happened they contain). Lots of people have books ghostwritten, and that's not considered unusual.
More than that, there are famous examples of books for which someone got the credit for the writing when they actually did little or none of it: John F. Kennedy being credited as the author of Profiles in Courage, for example. Even the content of Profiles in Courage was probably less Kennedy's than the content of the books Feynman gets credited for was Feynman's.
Her best point is basically her own subjective opinion that Feynman does not belong amongst the greatest physicists of all time like Newton and Einstein. And like yeah I guess that’s sort of true. But most of the video is just stating that Feynman’s fans are weird. Feynman is super popular because he made very impressive contributions to science AND he was charismatic and inspiring. It’s the combination of both and she mostly ignores that.
Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
In any case I’ve found Feynman’s work and life to be inspiring since I was a teenager. He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
> He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.
There were multiple points in the presentation on her experience with Feynman fans and why they deserved the Bros title.
* Having an unearned superiority complex while having misogynistic beliefs (6:50->8:23) - followed by examples of personal experiences by the video creator
* Making up stories about him (1:42:XX->1:44:XX)
* Thinking that negging is cool? I realize I already said misogynistic beliefs, but feel like this should be re-iterated (24:20->25:50). The example given about the Feynman and the waitress was particularly rage-inducing to me. I'm picturing my mother or wife in that scenario and some jackass doing that to them.
> Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
This is a mischaracterization of this section of the video. 37:33-> 39:45 for anyone else who wants to make their own judgement. The point was that people watch the clip of Feynman and come out with the wrong/harmful conclusions.
Regarding the negging incident, she left out important context in her summary of this part of the book.
Feynman went to a bar where it was clear that some of the women at that bar were intending to use men to get free drinks and food. In the incident he described, a woman asked him to buy three sandwiches and a drink at a diner and then says she has to run to go meet up with a lieutenant (taking the sandwiches with her). His negging, was to ask for her to pay for the sandwiches if she had no intention of staying and eating with him. Basically, not being a pushover.
Secondly, he states right after that in the book, "But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn't enjoy doing that."
I also think the incident about lying about whether he was a student while at Cornell was exaggerated. Feynman was 26 at the time and his wife had just died. In the anecdote about the dance, he mentions that some girls asked him if he was a student, and after getting rejected by others at the dance, he says "I don't want to say" and two girls go with him back to his place. But later he confesses, "I didn't want the situation to get so distorted and misunderstood, so I let them know I was a professor".
Overall, I don't find strong evidence of the claims that he was a misogynist or abusive to women in the book outside of his frequenting of a strip club, which may be enough for some people, but, I think people don't realize how different people's attitudes were to things like nudity and sex in the 70s and early 80s before AIDs was a thing.
(also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even though I've never been)
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
...
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying to get you to buy her drinks but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"
"Yes."
So it worked even with an ordinary girl!
The story about direct consensual sex with one "ordinary girl" doesn't validate that men should have misogynist attitudes towards ordinary women. It's just confirmation bias. It matters, because training your mind to be misogynist until it's automatic would spill over into other aspects of your life, like how you treat female coworkers.
Also while breaking the rules might be fun, lockpicking desks & sending coded messages out of Los Alamos "for fun" is maybe not for the best.
It's not just "experience in mischeveity", it's "being a general nuisance, then everyone clapped"
I LOVE the videos of how Feynman talks about physics and have read and loved many of the books she talked about. But really this whole video is, I think, spot on about them.
This all comes back to the observation I've made working with competent people, which is that we're all stuck trying to solve problems with the computational power of a slab of meat
(she later goes on to address this modesty as being underhanded)
(continued watching, two hours in now, this is great work)
All I see is people trying to point out the differences between "Richard Feynman the character" and "Richard Feynman the real person"
"Richard Feynman the character" would talk about how he goes to parties and is able to befuddled people in their native languages that he doesn't speak.
"Richard Feynman the person" was a nobel prize winning physicist
Do his tall tales have to be true for his nobel prize to be valid? Or can he be lying for his ego while still being a good scientist?
[EDIT] Oops, somehow this post appeared twice?