(2014) Relevant because since then it's become quite trendy to throw mud at men like him.
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?
In retrospect, I should have put "just" in quotes. I think that would have made intent more clear.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
It's less axe grinding and more counter-acting an inaccurate narrative.
I think anyone who has read his narratives realizes the dude had some personal flaws.
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.
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.
> 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
If his wife did write that memo, I’d say she had pretty good justification.
[0]: https://www.tumblr.com/centrally-unplanned/76851065507251814...
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 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.
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.
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...
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
(I should note that I have never particularly liked or cared about Feynman or any of the 20th century cult-of-personality physicists.)