Who smeared Richard Feynman? (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Who smeared Richard Feynman? (2014)

blog.nuclearsecrecy.com

73 pointssrean62 comments

This is actually kind of hilarious. That your ex-wife would write to the FBI to denounce your character a couple of months after the divorce.

I did really enjoy this detail:

> It was an extremely ugly, long (2 years!) divorce hearing: it made the newspapers because of Bell’s allegations of “extreme cruelty” by Feynman, including the notion that he spent all of his waking hours either doing calculus and playing the bongos.

Brilliant guy... but it is funny to think how nonstop bongos could definitely drive a spouse crazy.

Vindictiveness is a real thing.

The problem with extremely smart people is not many people understand them. They're typically going to be non-conformist in any event, and may come across as arrogant if they have an intricate belief system that you may not take the time to understand. I'd think one of the greatest scientists of a generation would have the kind of depth of thinking that few would understand. Having listened to many of his interviews (unfortunately I'm too young to have witnessed these things in real time) he comes across as one of the most eloquent people I can think of.

While reading through that I was suspecting it was perhaps a peer that was envious of Feynman, but an ex (scorned?) partner is extremely plausible.

> The problem with extremely smart people is not many people understand them. They're typically going to be non-conformist in any event, and may come across as arrogant if they have an intricate belief system that you may not take the time to understand.

This is the bucket Ayn Rand falls into. Her philosophy is radically different, revolutionizing the entire field, to the point that most people can’t even grasp that the things she questions are open to debate.

LMAO Ayn Rand could get rolled up by an 8th grader.

No idea about how social systems actually work, or how real humans act.

If there's one thing that was real about Rand it was that ego.

There's few people that can make an ass of themselves to multiple fields so quickly, but if you stuck an artist, an economist, and an anthropologist in the room with Rand, after 15 minutes they could have all left with a laugh on Rands behalf.

It's also so funny to me the modern US libertarians that claim to love her so much. Rand hated libertarians! She thought they were crybabies and had no moral or logical foundation.

> The problem with extremely smart people is not many people understand them.

I know this is a common trope in many media portrayals, but it's really not my experience. The "insufferable genius" stereotype tracks most not for the extremely smart people but the kinda-smart people who are absolute jerks but try to defend their jerkassery on the basis of their intelligence.

> The "insufferable genius" stereotype tracks most not for the extremely smart people but the kinda-smart people who are absolute jerks but try to defend their jerkassery on the basis of their intelligence.

Autism plays a lot into this. You'll get people who can seem condescending or unaware of different social norms, and it's genuinely not from a bad place, just a complete inability to understand their own communication style (especially in the moment).

> Autism plays a lot into this. You'll get people who can seem condescending or unaware of different social norms

Recently "autism" is a scapegoat for everything, both claiming to be autist to get a free pass to be a jerk, or calling someone autist because they do something unexpected.

I have been called autist after a meeting just because I said something could not be done in the timeframe proposed. Acording to social norms, the correct thing to do was to lie, say it could be easily done, and deal with expected missed deadlines with even more lies.

Another "autism" trait I have is to say a dry "no" to invitations I don't want to attend, apparently the social norm is to say "yes" and then fake an excuse a couple of hours ahead, or even worse, just don't go.

The point is the word "autism" (or even jerk) is being used as a synonym of "direct", "sincere" or "no bullshit" too often. And I am not talking about calling people fat or ugly out of the blue (that's a real jerk), but saying "no" when it is enough.

I understand where you're coming from. I wasn't meaning from the context of the pseudo-smart person portraying that (which is obviously a thing, probably more obvious nowadays), but a person that is the real article. You meet all walks of life in your lifetime and that unattainable-ness of very smart people can come across as inaccessible, unexplainable or arrogant.

The kind of person that has spent much time chiselling their belief system or is simply fascinated by a field of study that not many people can relate to on that depth. Feynman was a great communicator, but I can think of a few people that may have Asperger's syndrome that have that exceptional insight into things that sometimes results in collateral damage in relationships.

What I mean is there are exceptional people, and sometimes people fail to understand what is exceptional and take exception themselves.

The political narrative of the time obviously was extra cynical about declarations of which team you're playing for, or non-declaration. That's what I meant about non-conformist, they're not interested in the politics.

The few very brilliant people I've known devoted themselves to master a subject, at the cost of neglecting others, like socialization. They were not autists by any measure of the condition, just very socially undeveloped. Some embraced the awkwardness, but others chose to be jerks because it is easier than rescuing an atrophied skill. The jock equivalent of wearing baggy pants because they skipped leg days.

I've also known a handful of artists, and some seemed to adopt the tortured artist stereotype out of style, not fate. They were convinced no one would take them seriously artistically if they weren't interesting and eccentric. In their case, being a jerk is a fashion.

I guess my point is, we choose what skills we want to develop, and also if we accept the skill exchange, or make excuses like "I'm bad at X", "I am this way and can't change", etc. Leave that to people that are actually diagnosed with a limiting condition; they usually put a great deal of effort and still need help to succeed.

Feynman is known for being a very social guy, though.

Plausible; also marginal. We already knew that Edward Teller made these kinds of accusations against a lot of people and thereby did much greater harm.

Teller would misspell Fermi and Fuchs' names ? That would be strange.

Counterpoint: nomative determinism.

nominative

The joke, that was.

Would Teller have had to mail Hoover though? Or just let the concerned people know that Feynman was unsuitable.

Are you alleging that the FBI interviewer unknowingly interviewed Teller who was posing, with a high degree of skill, as a woman known to be closely associated with Feynman?

Because the FBI interviewer refers to the interviewee with feminine pronouns.

admittedly it would be really funny if Teller could just do that

I don’t think Teller worked with Feynman.

(2014) Relevant because since then it's become quite trendy to throw mud at men like him.

Not entirely without reason though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc

That video is such an extremely weak argument. Sure Feynman probably has more fame than he is merited. But he is still one of the most influential physicists. He just also happened to be entertaining and wrote some books. Personality and self-marketing makes a difference, welcome to society.

I'd recommend that you watch the entire video, because the point is that he did not even write any of those books.

I would say read up a little so that you are in a position to make up your own mind. Also compare the video recordings and published book to figure out whose material it was.

It's easy to throw muck at someone who is not around to defend.

And you seem to be saying that it is a reasonable thing to do in this particular case.

So someone took recordings of his stories and compiled them into a text....? What does that matter I have seen that entire video in the past, its unsubstantiated garbage that fails mild skepticism. Every point can be explained away trivially. They have an axe to grind against Fenyman / Men generally, and since this goes against the established narrative its therefore heralded as being correct and people blindly follow it.

I think you can come to a balanced view here where you acknowledge that Feynman was overhyped posthumously while maintaining that he was an exceptional physicist with some personal flaws. That's precisely the point of the video.

It's less axe grinding and more counter-acting an inaccurate narrative.

He was a top 10 20th century physicist-- and the 20th century was full of rock stars-- and a Nobel Laureate. He also did more interesting work outside his core domain than you'd expect; the cooperation with Thinking Machines, the Rogers Commission, early use of computers as an instrument, institutional/advisory roles, etc.

I think anyone who has read his narratives realizes the dude had some personal flaws.

Yah. He didn't write the Feynman Lectures on Physics. He just came up with the unique arguments in them and gave the lectures at Caltech; it fell to Leighton and Sands to do most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book.

And his other books-- they're just his stories, trying to capture the characteristic style in which he talked, while editing it to be a cohesive written work.

This criticism is maybe valid for QED-- I am not sure what fraction of that he was really involved in-- but not the rest of his body of work. Is this supposed to be bad?

Do you mean he didn’t write the lectures he gave to students? I know the books weren’t put together by him and were substantially edited, but I thought the original lectures as delivered by him were either all or largely his work.

I once worked through part of the first volume of his lectures in the published book while listening to the recordings of him partly out of curiosity to see how much the original lectures as he gave them matched the ones which were compiled and published in written form (which I already knew was something not done by him). I came away feeling impressed one could either stick so closely to some lecture notes when lecturing and/or put together a written work which so closely matched a spoken one without coming across as being a transcript. It’s quite the accomplishment and one which I felt was a credit to everyone involved.

Yah, I was saying the volumes.

> put together a written work which so closely matched a spoken one without coming across as being a transcript.

Leighton deserves the credit for this. Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

> Leighton deserves the credit for this. Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

It's pretty clear he also used the recordings of the lectures themselves. Otherwise there'd be a much bigger difference between the lectures as presented in the books and the audio recordings[1] of him actually giving the lectures. Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them.

> Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

I don't doubt his notes would be, however they also used the audio recordings of and took notes during the lectures themselves for the books. I'm not sure how much they relied on Feynman's notes themselves though. It's been about 15 years since I last read and listened to them together, but I recall the experience of the combined activity being that the book was surprisingly close to being a transcript of what he said (including references to figures which the books reproduced).

This is why I thought it was impressive that the book didn't read like a transcript on its own. I rarely encountered professors who gave such well-structured lectures, but it seems like something Feynman could not only give prepared lectures in this way, but could do this off the cuff as well.

[1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html

> Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them

I'm sorry that it's difficult to convey tone on the internet. My intent was to highlight that absurdity that seemed to be present in the comment that I replied to-- Feynman only came up with the physics and gave the lectures, but didn't actually "write the book" is not much of a gotcha as far as the accomplishment goes.

It doesn't take away from Feynman, but it maybe adds a lot to each of the Leightons that they could capture such a range of ideas and Feynman's tone so well without simply repeating things verbatim in that transcript style.

> (including references to figures which the books reproduced).

Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction. So Leighton definitely deserves a whole lot of respect for producing the work, from audio recordings, a few spare photographs, and notes. Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this:

https://i.imgur.com/zQessy9.png

(And it seems Feynman gave this 60 minute lecture quickly wandering between history, geometrical ideas, and dynamics-- that still seems well organized-- with these few pages of sparse notes).

Feynman's ability to give an off the cuff lecture is astounding and probably an area where he is world class. I think of the one recorded interview with him, and his shockingly deep answers to simple questions that were off the cuff. His response to "why do magnets push/pull eachother" and what the issue is with asking "why" requires a lot of introspection is stellar.

I linked the "why do magnets do that?" interview elsewhere in the comments, but if anyone else missed it I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q

It's from Fun to Imagine-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA

No worries! That makes sense. I got tripped up by "just came up with the unique arguments [...] and gave the lectures" and "Leighton and Sands [did] most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book". It felt like glossing over the degree to which the books' contents match the words he spoke.

> Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction.

I feel this deeply. I'm very slow at writing by hand and have trouble paying attention to what someone's saying if I'm also trying to simultaneously summarize it. In college I solved this by becoming very, very swift with LaTeX. My pure math notes were easiest, but I struggled with physics notes the most. I settled on a middle ground of learning TikZ and making a bunch of LaTeX macros for common stuff. This did well enough for most simple diagrams. I'd fall back to hand-copying more complicated ones and just typing the text. I'd either scan the drawings afterward and add annotations as needed or convert fully into LaTeX. Converting these hand-drawn ones into LaTeX was a ton of work. After doing this for a short bit, I realized that I was remembering the more complicated diagrams better than the easier ones. I figured out that being able to take almost verbatim notes easily wasn't making me absorb the material at all, so I started spending more time afterward tidying everything up to make things stick a bit better.

> Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/zQessy9.png

That's really cool. That note looks about as inscrutable as the ones I have from when I was being taught a crash course in QCD.

You appear to be parroting the nonsense from Collier's "I hate Feynman" videos. Feynman gave the FLP lectures at Caltech, which were recorded and photographed, but at that time there was no intention of making them into a book. Leighton and Sands (with the help of some secretaries and grad. students) transcribed these lectures, and then lightly edited them, for use by Caltech students as study notes. These fell into the hands of publishers a couple years later, and they were the ones who proposed turning them into a book. I am now the Editor of those books. To say Feynman "didn't write" FLP may be true in the most literal sense that he did not set pen to paper, but the content is his, as you can easily verify by going to The Feynman Lectures Website, where you can listen to the recordings and see the photos of the original lectures and compare them to the book - they are the same, except for very minor changes that would be required to make any spoken lecture readable.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980929 , posted days before your comment.

In retrospect, I should have put "just" in quotes. I think that would have made intent more clear.

I cannot take seriously someone pretending that Feynman was a sham

The video points out that the legacy not the man is a sham.

There is just a big market for "X great person of the past was actually awful" and "what you learned in school is actually a conspiracy". That these things get spread like wildfire whenever they are brought up, because some people thinks it make them seem smarter I assume. They also drop all introspection or skepticism about it. I would put "Feynman is actually awful" in the same bucket as the "Mercator project is a racist conspiracy" (No one owns a globe apparently) or the multitude of "actually x woman is responsible for scientific advancement, not the man" stories that get spread around. They all fail at any real analysis.

Mercator is a racist conspiracy by big Greenland !

Very funny. You will probably be misunderstood though.

Feynman did physics and told stories.

He was very serious about his physics and wrote that stuff down.

Someone else wrote down his stories. His stories were probably often not entirely accurate, and whomever wrote down his stories also probably had an agenda. So books "by feynman" should be treated with some caution since they're written not by feynman.

His physics and science are obviously not "a sham". It is in fact possible for someone to be great and awful at the same time.

I haven't seen many people going around saying Ed Witten is a security risk due to communist loyalties.

Feynman really deserves it though: [0]. I admit to being part of the problem here, because in the 2000s and 2010s, I was in the Feynman cult with everyone else, but once you dig a little deeper under the quirky anecdotes (many of which are probably fictional), it’s clear he was kind of a scumbag and a lot of his reputation is whitewashing by what we’d now call fanboys.

If his wife did write that memo, I’d say she had pretty good justification.

[0]: https://www.tumblr.com/centrally-unplanned/76851065507251814...

That link demonstrates that he deserved a domestic abuse charge, not that he was a communist. I think the latter is still a smear, insofar as the (speculated) author is seeking justice through any avenue afforded.

(I should note that I have never particularly liked or cared about Feynman or any of the 20th century cult-of-personality physicists.)

The stuff that the material in Feynman's book is not his is just made up nonsense. They follow his course lectures very very closely. The minutiae of writing may not be his, but the material certainly was his.

Regarding domestic abuse charges, this was before we had no fault divorce. It was common at that time to make up charges of abuse, often in concert with the lawyers of both parties just to ensure that divorce is granted.

So it is not a clear open and shut case at all.

I don't think people really make up domestic abuse charges with this much detail. His wife explains in the post specifically what causes him to get so angry that he hurts her.

I don't see her having much incentive to lie and make up these statements, and see no evidence that she did lie. Some women lie about domestic abuse, most don't.

If the wild allegations in the smearjob was hers, she does not rank very high on credibility.

Going by what people say, it was not unusual at all to use false allegations of abuse (or adultery) in divorce proceedings at that time. Sometimes it was the only way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8025878

Both those statements need to be prove for her, and I don't see any strong evidence for either.

And if someone was going to to make false allegations of abuse, why include specifics about how interrupting his calculus and drums caused his anger? Why not just say he was abusive, or state a more common reason for abuse? To me, the specifics make her statement more credible. Combined with his predatory history regarding women[1], I view Feynman as a distrubed individual (but a genius nonetheless)

I find the allegation credible, as I don't see why someone in her position would lie, and especially give specific details on what sets Feynman off.

Also, unless I see some concrete data about the amount/percentage of women who lie in order to get a divorce, the comment you linked is pure conjecture. Nothing really to argue about since it's just the vague idea of what people think about that time.

[1] https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...

> Both those statements need to be prove for her, and I don't see any strong evidence for either.

You can query the search engines yourself, it's a pretty standard and accepted thing now based on analysis of the letter and that the interview with the FBI officer happened in her home town, Boise, Idaho. Only personal connect that Feynman had with Boise, Idaho is through his 2nd wife, Mary Louise Bell.

The redacted FBI files still contain references to the informant as "she" and "her" and accusations match the tone of her wife's divorce filings.

https://share.google/aimode/7JeIsDlMrouAUCKiE (on general consensus on who was the smearer)

https://share.google/aimode/Yhzt0fim0kljZgHQ7 (on where the interview with the informer took place)

Regarding specificity of complaints, of course, she was not an idiot, these are filings in a divorce court, unless it's specific it would likely be thrown out. On top of that there were divorce lawyers overseeing the filing of these accusations, it would be their job to make it specific.

Yes, circumstantial, but as damning as you can get. A vindictive wife with a tendency to throw wild accusations ... not a particularly credible source, especially when compared with how Feynman's sister and other wives talk about him.

As for the baffler article the only concrete thing is his anecdote in surely you are joking, that's well addressed in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972641

and here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46970233

In the very first sentence, with the usage of "Feynman bros", we understand that it is not a text honestly discussing the limits and failures of Feynman (which would not be very interesting anyway), but a politically motivatedl attack against a man seen as too famous and influential.

Too famous and influential in physics. Right?

Yeah, even if his fame went a bit beyond physics

I know what you mean but this framing is dismissive. I think the larger change is that it's become a bit more acceptable in the society as a whole to acknowledge that many men we've held up on pedestals were actually flawed, or at the very least to give more credence and attention to stories told by contemporaries. In the case of Feynman, I think the way he writes about his relationship with women gives clear examples of misogyny. From an article[1] on this subject:

> Among his many accomplishments, he contributed to several key conceptual breakthroughs in quantum physics, and his role in developing the field of quantum electrodynamics led to a Nobel Prize in 1965, which he shared with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga. [...] He came off as a fun, likeable guy who just liked to do math, play pranks, and bang on the bongos.

> These things are true. But it’s also true that throughout his career, Feynman reveled in blatant misogyny and sexism. In “Surely You’re Joking”, Feynman details how he adopted the mindset of a pick-up artist (an outlook he also claims to have eventually abandoned) by treating women as if they were worthless and cruelly lashing out at them when they rejected his advances. He worked and held meetings in strip clubs, and while a professor at Cal Tech, he drew naked portraits of his female students. Even worse, perhaps, he pretended to be an undergraduate student to deceive younger women into sleeping with him.

Mythologizing or overly condemning figures is bad. I think it's one of the worst things we can do. It's both a disservice to everyone who knew them because it can minimize his impact on them and a disservice to the person themselves by inaccurately remembering them and is bad for society because it impedes our ability to learn. Personally I would be quite surprised if a guy at that time wasn't fairly sexist just given how often even as a kid I saw obvious sexism from people who were even a generation younger than him. I read the Feynman Lectures (which are freely available[2]!) as an undergrad and later interned on a couple collider experiments at RHIC and CEBAF where I encountered a lot more of his impact on quantum electro and chromodynamics. He was undeniably massively impactful and a brilliant communicator. I'd recommend everyone studying physics read his lectures and watch some interviews[3] with him.

He was also human and would have had common flaws like anyone else. His books strongly indicate this. I don't think this means he was the devil, but it should be something we think about. I think you can reasonably debate whether or not people in historical contexts should be judged "good" or "bad" based on ethical standards which are more commonly accepted now than they were then, but I can't imagine a good reason to ignore the existence of those flaws or to say they don't matter. People treat Feynman as a role model, but I hope most people can agree that trying to sleep with undergrads when you're a professor is bad and should not be emulated.

[1] https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...

[2] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

[3] I particularly like this one, though I feel a bit bad for the interviewer (also his ice melting explanation is probably wrong, but he does couch it with "so they say") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q

Related. Others?

Who Smeared Richard Feynman? (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23418130 - June 2020 (56 comments)

Who smeared Richard Feynman? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024982 - July 2014 (54 comments)

I thought it's known for a long time already that it was his second wife, from Boise, Idaho.

hell hath no fury

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