[HN Gopher] The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)
___________________________________________________________________
The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)
Author : okfine
Score : 70 points
Date : 2023-05-12 07:43 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nybooks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nybooks.com)
| babuloseo wrote:
| This is amazing, I don't like the part about womanizing behaviour
| etc, I think it should be omitted from the article, other than
| that 10/10 autobiography.
| ftxbro wrote:
| I feel like his womanizing behavior was bad and that it was
| also somehow wrapped up in his attention seeking and other self
| promoting drives that made him so well known. I don't think it
| should be hidden.
| nearmuse wrote:
| I am really tired of dirt being brought up each time a
| discussion of a renowned figure is happening. It obviously
| detracts from the inspiration or immersion people are trying
| to derive from bringing up those renowned figures. They are
| intentionally focusing on the positive aspects, and those who
| are bringing the garbage up are intentionally detracting from
| it.
| chowells wrote:
| You think there's a problem reminding readers that
| venerated people aren't good role models? Why? Why not
| strive to be _better_ than them, intentionally moving past
| their flaws?
| guenthert wrote:
| Mr Feynman is well known (among other) for his work in the
| field of quantum electrodynamic theory (for which he won the
| Nobel price), his diagrams, his lectures and his work in the
| commission investigating the challenger catastrophe.
|
| Are those the self-promoting drives you refer to?
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| When it comes to how we was self promoting, I think it's
| fair to look at his autobiography (edit: autobiographical
| anecdotes is probably a better description of the book)
| (Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman). In which he describes
| his own redpillish behavior towards women, and brags about
| how he would troll waitresses by purposely setting up time
| bomb messes for them to cleanup.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| I assume that the parent commenter was referring to being a
| good teacher and charismatic lecturer.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| How is "womanizing" a concept that makes sense, or has any
| meaning in modern times?
|
| If I understand correctly, it describes a man that only has
| casual relationships with women. The implication being that all
| woman only want long term committed relationships, and any man
| doing this must be somehow exploiting or tricking the woman.
|
| Nowadays, it is widely accepted that preferring casual
| relationships is within the range of normal preferences for
| both men and women- some people prefer it, others don't. If
| both women and men can choose and prefer consenting casual
| relationships, the concept that a man can be a "womanizer"
| seems to be paternalistic and infantizing to women. It also
| implies some sort of old fashioned 'duty' on the part of a man
| to essentially marry anyone he dates, even if they realize they
| are incompatible, and neither has a desire to stay together.
| jandrese wrote:
| Eh, the biography sometimes veers heavily into redpill
| territory. He has a frank discussion of negging in order to
| seduce women. I personally think #canceled is far too eager
| to throw the baby out with the bathwater and if you just
| cruise through that section with the mentality that he's a
| product of his time then it's still a fascinating work.
|
| I also personally think that there are multiple parts of the
| book that have been "spiced up" because that's the kind of
| personality he has.
| tshaddox wrote:
| There's no need to do mental gymnastics around the definition
| of the word "womanizing" as if all criticisms of Feynman's
| behavior can be reduced to that single word and then
| dismissed by opining over the definition of that single word.
| In reality, there are a fair number of much more specific
| claims about his behavior that are not reducible to that
| single word and can be described without even using that word
| if one finds it impossible to move past that word.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Go ahead and name these "problematic" claims if you like.
| It's long since tiresome to see so many historical figures
| with co much to recommend them being judged through an
| obsession with their failures to live and think like 21st
| century human beings of a specific and still very debatable
| set of morals.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm confident you can find the claims in mere minutes if
| you genuinely haven't seen them and are interested.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Likewise. Vague things that it's absurd to use again and
| again in any mention of all the enormous contributions
| that Feynman made to science and an interest in science
| among younger people. The polarization towards this one
| specific thing, which in this case also happens to be
| vague, speaks of a tacitly puritanical need to paint
| black anyone who somehow decades ago didn't fit just
| right with a specific notion of modern moral correctness.
| Laughable idiocy.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I couldn't. All the accusations are vague to the point of
| uselessness. What is the convincing claim in your eyes?
| tshaddox wrote:
| I have no inside information and I haven't done any
| particularly focused research into any of the claims. I'm
| only referring to extremely widely known and very easy to
| find claims that are much more specific than the single
| word "womanizing." I'm not trying to convince anyone of
| their veracity or litigate details of claims on a point
| by point basis. I just think it's disingenuous to reduce
| all such claims to a single or imply that they're vague
| or difficult to find.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| It's not widely known to me and I found concrete claims
| difficult to find.
|
| Why are you so shy about simply naming specifics on a
| subject you claim is widely known and easy to find
| information on?
| logdap wrote:
| [dead]
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| This book had such a big impact on me. Really helped fuel my love
| of science and gave me a sense of the scientific community as a
| special group of people.
| JackFr wrote:
| Possibly my favorite biography.
| interfixus wrote:
| Yes, it's all the way up there. As these coincidenses will
| sometimes have it, I just dug out my old paperback copy from
| the basement a few days ago, and looking mightily forward to a
| reread.
| michael_nielsen wrote:
| I've heard that Murray Gell-Mann said of this book that "Jim
| Gleick has written a biography about Feynman's genius in order to
| illustrate his own". A bit backhanded, perhaps, but it captures
| the essence well: it's an extraordinary book about an
| extraordinary person. The best biography I've ever read, along
| with Skidelsky's one-volume Keynes.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| > He joined a fraternity, one of the two that took in Jews.
|
| This was a surprising reminder that things were very different in
| 1935.
|
| I wonder, is there any group like this today? "One of the two
| that took in X" for any X seems like an interesting formula for
| locating outliers, whether good or bad.
|
| A lot of nasty examples come to mind, but it's hard to know how
| Jews were regarded at the time. I wonder what the official
| justification was for denying access to Feynman.
|
| (I'm half Jewish on my father's side, and I only discovered this
| by accident a few years ago. So I've been trying to research my
| heritage wherever I can.)
| eig wrote:
| I graduated from MIT undergrad a few years ago. There were
| certainly no restrictions on cultural background in the
| fraternities, though certain fraternities (and some dorm
| floors) did have reputations for having disproportionate of
| people coming from a particular ethnicity (e.g. asian) or
| heading towards a particular career path (e.g. finance, or
| medicine). FWIW I almost joined a frat that I would've been a
| minority in, but I never felt excluded while rushing that or
| any of the other frats.
| jhbadger wrote:
| And he only went to MIT as an undergraduate because his first
| choice Columbia had a "Jew quota" and they had already admitted
| all the Jews they wanted to for that year. Besides the
| antisemitism, it's also a reminder that in the 1930s MIT was
| seen as a good, but not particularly elite school and would be
| somebody's backup school.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Now that's fascinating. Thank you. Both that Columbia was as
| regarded as MIT and that MIT hadn't achieved its current
| fame.
|
| It's odd to realize that I've always thought of MIT as MIT,
| yet (obviously, now) it wasn't always that way. I wonder what
| the tipping point was.
| zamfi wrote:
| MIT was only a few decades old at the time -- having been
| founded about 75 years prior. Columbia was over twice as
| old at the time (185 years) and was well-established as a
| global center of physics research.
| hawk_ wrote:
| Makes me wonder how big a role did the "Jew Quota" or
| similar discriminatory practices played in holding back the
| likes of Columbia. Also whether we will see a similar
| effect over next 50 years with affirmative vs non-
| affirmative schools.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Probably WWII, with the American radar research program
| (not as famous as the Manhattan Project but probably
| equally or more important) centered there.
| ghaff wrote:
| Gunsights too. That was how Doc Draper who later
| pioneered inertial navigation and whose lab designed the
| Apollo Guidance Computer first made his name. (Draper
| Labs is no longer formally affiliated with MIT as it was
| divested during the Vietnam War.)
|
| But WWII was probably a major catalyst in the US to the
| rise in prominence of all the great science and
| engineering research universities. (There are actually a
| lot of inventors from that era like Draper who although
| they were also theoreticians to some degree one suspects
| might not fit in with a modern research university
| faculty.)
| ghaff wrote:
| There were a ton of membership organizations that, probably
| even quite a bit later, required one or more members to vouch
| for you and generally excluded people who didn't fit the
| generally WASPy mold. (And often male--male only organizations
| were quite widespread until relatively recently and AFAIK frats
| --as well as sororities--can be single-sex but mostly based on
| the fact that some level of living arrangements are OK to
| restrict one sex or the other.)
| ioblomov wrote:
| Surprisingly, Columbia didn't accept women until 1983. Like
| Harvard and Radcliffe, it was affiliated with the all-female
| Barnard.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/23/nyregion/columbia-
| plans-t...
| ghaff wrote:
| A _lot_ of well-known private colleges /universities were
| single-sex, albeit sometimes with exchange programs, until
| recently and there remain significant single-sex,
| especially all-women, colleges today. Dartmouth, another
| Ivy, didn't go co-ed until 1972.
|
| A lot of universities, especially those more focused on
| science and engineering, that were technically co-ed--even
| from their start in the 1800s--also didn't have a lot of
| women for a long time. The percentage of women at MIT was
| still under 20% in the late seventies.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-05-12 23:01 UTC)