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Comment by vonneumannstan | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to dunk on someone unable to defend themselves.

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.

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It's not a critique of his work (although to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century). Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.

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.

> to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century

Who would you put in the top 10 ahead of him?

Let's see ... Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Bohm, Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Ehrenfest?

I'd put Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and Dirac ahead of Feynman. I'm not so sure about the others; not that they weren't world class physicists, but so was Feynman.

Planck? His greatest achievements were a bit before the 20-th century.

Feynman also became active in physics right at the end of the heroic era. So he's disadvantaged by it.

If we're limiting to work actually done in the 20th century, yes, I agree Planck might not qualify because of the century boundary. And we also get to split hairs over whether 1900, when Planck published his quantum hypothesis, is in the 20th century or the 19th. :-)

Einstein for sure. For the rest: I'm not sure that they're clearly ahead of Feynman. I'm not sure they're behind, either. To me, they seem to kind of be in a cluster.

Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mann are probably greater.

Rutherford, planck , bohr jumpstarted the 20th century physics .

Without the 20th century restriction, she rants against the list "Einstein. Newton. Feynman."

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."

I would agree that Maxwell belongs above Feynman if we're talking about modern physicists and not limiting ourselves to the 20th century.

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.

> Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.

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.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is not about how to do physics, and the book was ghostwritten, by a non-physicist.

It's “ghostwritten” by the same measures interviews are. There exist recordings of Feynman telling the stories to Ralph Leighton.

As the video points out, Feynman was telling tall tales to impress a much younger man, Ralph Leighton. Ralph Leighton decided to publish stories that told a specific narrative, that being an asshole was cool, and he omitted more wholesome stories about Feynman being supportive of women.

> you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein

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 reason he did badly in school

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...

That user is talking about university, not grade school.

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...

> Einstein excelled in school.

hotdogscout correctly clarified that I meant university, not grade school. Sorry for the ambiguity on my part.

Sounds like you went to a pretty unusual school? It definitely wasn't on my reading list during a similar time period. But it seems like your doing a lot of selection bias here. People interested in become Physicists inevitably hear about him and the sample of people active on HN is wildly different from the general public.

He developed quantum electrodynamics, the first fully fleshed-out quantum field theory. In the process, the invented the action formulation of quantum field theory, which is absolutely fundamental to the modern understanding of the subject, and he invented the method of solving path integrals perturbatively that everyone has used since (Feynman diagrams).

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.

To be clear that YouTube video is not really a critique of Richard Feynman, especially not his scientific career, it's a critique of people who knew him writing books and making content using his name and making money off it as if it came directly from him. It also critiques some of his behavior around interactions with students or telling what amounts to tall tales or standup comedy jokes and then other people taking it as gospel. Richard Feynman did not write the book "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". And some of the content in that book seems like it may greatly exaggerated or even be completely fabricated. And Feynman was not alive to see much of what was published in his name or using his name.

Without having watched the videos, to say that people made content using his name and made money off of it without Feynman knowing is disingenuous. Ralph Leighton recorded the conversations as Feynman was struggling with cancer. There are even portions of those recordings out in the web [1]. Feynman was fully aware of the books because there was apparently a scandal where Murray Gell-mann threatened to sue Feynamn and Leighton because of some mischaracterization. Feynman was apparently hurt and issued a correction in the subsequent version of the book [2]. So it seems that he was FULLY AWARE and actively endorsed the book.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Tapes-Research-Chemist-storie... [2] https://feynman.com/stories/al-seckel-on-feynman/

You should watch the video. People who are not Ralph Leighton published books about Feynman posthumously without his knowledge and made money off of it.

Many people write books on interesting subjects posthumously (biographies come to mind). I believe it would be up to the descendants of Feynman to sue if due legal etiquettes were not maintained. Having said that, all famous Feynman books like the Feynman lectures, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, Please of finding things out, etc are edited pieces of Feynman's recorded audio, no doubt about that.

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.

> 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 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.

I'm sorry but didn't we already establish that most of his famous books are the edited contents of his recordings with some of those audios available to download as well? Does a person have to actually sit down and write it out and dictations don't count?

I already addressed the editorializing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43138957

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.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

"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)

It was dictated by Feynman. Parts of his original interview are still available as stated in my comment above. And as far as embllishment goes, I'm pretty sure all autobiographies suffer this fate.

It's also easy to dunk on someone without watching their content. You should probably watch the video if you want to dunk on it. It does not dunk on his physics. It's extremely thoroughly researched and it's about "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" which is specifically about the legacy of anecdotes about his personality, and is different from the actual physics legacy of Richard Feynman, and it is extremely clear on this point.

I watched the video months ago and found it pandering and boring.

Was it accurate or not? Who cares if the presentstion was to your liking? The question is whether or not its claims are accurate. You sound like the Feynman Bros she talks about.

Frankly, I am extremely confident that you only watched a little bit of it.

Pandering to whom?

You can add to the list, "Putnam Fellow." And, not only was he a fellow, he apparently trounced the scores of the other 4 fellows:

    "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."

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

Feynman's grasp of mathematics was astounding

The video is not about Feynman's actual career. That's actually the point -- the idea of Feynman people have in their minds is totally divorced from the actual person and his work.

Maybe true in the early 90s but I don't imagine really anyone in the general public is familiar with him anymore. Physicists know of him.

>is about Feynman being famous because of this book rather than because of his physics.

People still do very much know of him. My mother is the person who introduced me to his book. I was showing some interest in science in school when it was presented to me though. Though he's probably waning from "household name" status he's likely still widely known

A lot of the comments on this post are references to the book "surely you're joking Mr Feynman", which was a collection of stories(with a lot of embellishment) told by Feynman.

That is the "sham legacy of Richard Feynman", the fact that most people remember him for stories and not his work

You should try actually watching the video before writing a manifesto.

He is known for being a bad ass scientists and super slick with the ladies.

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.

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