[HN Gopher] Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his deat...
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Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-02-21 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (digital.archives.caltech.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (digital.archives.caltech.edu)
| dhosek wrote:
| "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved."
|
| That seems a reasonable goal.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| By who standard? It seems like an unsolvable problem to know
| every problem that is actually been solved correctly...
| cbracketdash wrote:
| I think he's being sarcastic
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| It doesn't strike me as likely that Feynman would have
| written this with sarcasm behind it. Maybe someone knows
| the details better. Personally, I think it looks more like
| the sort of goal that you aim for even it's not literally
| possible. "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll
| land among the stars."
| yunwal wrote:
| dhosek was being sarcastic, not Feynman
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Neither of them were. The quote is saying "practice
| solving problems on solved problems as much as you can"
| and dhosek is saying "good idea".
| turnsout wrote:
| I read it with a different (epistemic) emphasis... I don't
| need to know the solution if I know _how_ to solve it. I 've
| never produced a chip before, but I know how the problem has
| been solved by others. And therefore if I break it down, I
| could solve it myself.
|
| It's also possible that he meant every problem _in your
| domain._ That would be slightly more reasonable, and
| something I could agree with.
| hinkley wrote:
| Feynman was a huge proponent of, whether he knew it or not,
| compression being a form of modeling.
|
| He thought everything settled about physics should be teachable
| in the freshmen introductory series, and if he couldn't make it
| fit that meant we didn't really understand it yet.
|
| I personally like the idea of upper level classes being about
| things we are still working out. That feels more like preparing
| people for the real world, where your job is to figure stuff
| out they couldn't teach you in class because you and your
| coworkers are going to write the "book". Or at least make money
| because not enough people have figured "it" out to make it
| cheap.
| Molitor5901 wrote:
| Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is one of my favorite books.
| We lost him much too soon.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I was a UCLA anesthesiology attending in the 1980s when Feynman
| came to our OR for an abdominal procedure after having been
| diagnosed with kidney cancer. I watched as he was wheeled down
| the hall toward OR 9, our largest, reserved for major
| complicated operations. As he was wheeled into the room, he
| clasped his two hands above his head like a prizefighter.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Seriously? That is so cool that you were there. Sad that we
| lost him fairly young. Such a legend, I love his work.
| sympil wrote:
| I found this to be illuminating:
|
| https://youtu.be/TwKpj2ISQAc?si=O0qabLdBkmWq3jVX
| gitremote wrote:
| "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" is about Feynman being
| famous because of this book rather than because of his physics.
| The YouTuber, an obsessed physicist who had spent months
| reading all Feynman books, provides a critical analysis and
| explains the cultural impact of "Surely You're Joking,
| Mr.Feynman!"
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
| esafak wrote:
| The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Autobiographies.
|
| 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."
| torlok wrote:
| Watch the video. Feynman didn't write a single book.
| pdonis wrote:
| I shouldn't have to watch several hours of video to see
| what the basis is for such an outlandish-sounding claim.
| wk_end wrote:
| That's fair - although it's a really great video!
|
| 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.
| lemonberry wrote:
| "He lived, he died, the rest is anecdote"
| dralley wrote:
| Yeah, it's hard not to see some truth in what Murray Gell-
| Mann said, which is that he spent as much time trying to come
| up with stories about himself as he did working.
|
| 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.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| And his Nobel Prize, the highest acclamation by his peers
| that exists. The people eager to tear him down seem to forget
| that.
|
| [EDIT] Oops, somehow this post appeared twice?
| torlok wrote:
| The video is a critical look at the legend of Richard
| Feynman, not his work. You should watch it.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| And his Nobel Prize, the highest possible acclamation by his
| peers. The people eager to tear him down seem to overlook
| that.
| speff wrote:
| One minute and thirty seconds into the video: "Amazing
| Nobel Prize winning physicist"
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| 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.
| archermarks wrote:
| 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.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| 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.
| furyofantares wrote:
| 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.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| I watched the video months ago and found it pandering and
| boring.
| sympil wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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?
| sho_hn wrote:
| Let's see ... Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg,
| Bohm, Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Ehrenfest?
| pdonis wrote:
| 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.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > 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...
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| 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.
| Sincere6066 wrote:
| You should try actually watching the video before writing a
| manifesto.
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| 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.
| roadbuster wrote:
| 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
| furyofantares wrote:
| Wow. This is very, very good. Thanks.
|
| 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.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I watched this video and honestly did not find any of her
| points very compelling.
|
| 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".
| speff wrote:
| Frankly I'm having trouble believing you watched the video
| if you make the assertion:
|
| > 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.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| The person talking in the video lost me, when she criticized
| pupils asking about air resistance. Basically that was me,
| literally, without having known anything about Feynman. I
| simply asked, because I was interested in how one would
| calculate that, rather than the boring "use formula from
| book, plug in values, get result". I wanted to know more. Not
| because I wanted to "seem smart because I know air exists".
| That's such very silly take. And in fact there were many
| people, who would not have even thought about air possibly
| having an effect on a falling object. Basically she is raving
| on against curious students. Maybe she is herself not so
| curious and cannot stand it. Who knows.
| FredPret wrote:
| Someone making a 2h 48 min rant about how a dead, great
| physicist was "not that great" is oddly the opposite of
| convincing
| jandrese wrote:
| How much of that book do you think is the literal truth and how
| much do you think was embellished? When I read it my impression
| is that Feynmann is the kind of storyteller that doesn't let
| the boring real life details get in the way of a good story.
| Some of it is completely believable, like the general telling
| people to never have their safes open when he is around, but
| others came across as a bit fanciful to me, especially when he
| started talking about women. I'm guessing every story has at
| least a grain of truth in it, but I would like to hear
| perspectives from the other people in the stories.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Murray Gelman used to hate him.
|
| Freeman Dyson loved him.
|
| (Both nobel prize winners)
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Dyson has won nearly every award other than the Nobel.
| Sincere6066 wrote:
| It makes me so sad to read opinions like this.
| jmcgough wrote:
| Recently started to read his book, and was shocked at how
| much my interpretation of Feynman seems to differ from the
| frequent praises. Smart and a gifted science communicator,
| but even these embellished stories told in the most
| flattering light, he comes across as an egotistical jerk and
| misogynist. How many female physics majors changed studies
| after enduring his extremely creepy behavior?
|
| I hope that people who read this book in the future are able
| to recognize some of his truly toxic traits, and not think
| that being a jerk is part of his genius like the Steve Jobs
| mythos.
| speff wrote:
| Reminds me of this quote by Stephen Gould
|
| > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and
| convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty
| that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton
| fields and sweatshops
|
| How many women or other discriminated-against people didn't
| have the chance to make a difference in the world because
| of attitudes of people like Feynman?
| Conscat wrote:
| Instruction manual on negging women from the perspective of an
| abuser.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| Richard Feynman having the quantum Hall effect on his "to learn"
| list is amazing. I mean, it makes sense, because less than three
| years before he died the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for
| its discovery. But it shows that even one of the greatest
| physicists of his generation had not fully grasped something that
| is now part of every undergraduate physics degree's standard
| curriculum and is arguably much less complicated than, say,
| Feynman's contributions to Quantum Electrodynamics.
| mkagenius wrote:
| Being part of a course doesn't mean the students get enough
| time to delve as deep or have as deep an understanding of the
| phenomenon though.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I agree. Someone might be able to understand and reproduce
| some basic components of the system in the same way I use
| mathematics effectively, but to say I have an understanding
| of the fundamentals at any level like Wolfram does.
| asdff wrote:
| Yeah, imagine if the undergrads had to write out the
| underlying proof. When I took physics classes the professors
| would do things for our exams like assume gravity is 10 ms to
| give people an easier time with the numbers, and of course
| the spherical frictionless cow.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Even the greatest of us are only human.
|
| Also, the way many discoveries are explained in a course is
| usually very streamlined compared to the papers that present
| them initially and defend them in detail on a limited number of
| pages.
| leonewton253 wrote:
| "What I cannot create, I do not understand."
|
| "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved."
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| Does anyone know if this was his personal blackboard? For
| example, would've his students seen this blackboard?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| His motto "What I cannot create, I do not understand" has been
| one of the driving forces in my own quest to understand more
| about the world around me. A good friend had picked up a
| corollary which was "What I cannot teach, I do not understand"
| which I think was quite similar. Definitely one of my heroes.
| gregschlom wrote:
| > "What I cannot teach, I do not understand"
|
| And the corollary to that, from 17th century French writer
| Nicolas Boileau: "Ce que l'on concoit bien s'enonce clairement,
| et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisement." - What we
| understand well, we express clearly, and words to describe it
| flow easily.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| I'm french and I have a great memory about that quote. In
| high school my litterature and physics teachers had a
| disagreement about it, although I believe they didn't know
| about each other's point of views. Only us the students did,
| as they each hand waved great insights about the world with
| this quote. One was arguing, much like you, about the
| profound truth there is to it. The other was quick to explain
| that they perfectly conceived how to ride a bicycle, but like
| most of us couldn't possibly teach it at a blackboard. I
| leave it to you to guess which was which :)
| endoblast wrote:
| Where it gets complicated is that one can know _how_ to do
| something without being able to explain it to oneself let
| alone teach it to others.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| I'm a native English speaker who, a lifetime ago, moved to
| Shanghai to teach English to adults. One of my biggest
| struggles when I first started was explaining to students
| not just what the correct English should be in a given
| situation, but _why_ that was the correct English. This had
| a profound effect on my view of expertise and experts in
| general.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Exactly correct, but I would say 'Where it gets interesting
| ...' as opposed to complicated. Like the bike riding
| comment in a peer to the parent of this comment, there is a
| difference between 'operating' and 'creating' right?
| Knowing how to ride a bike tells you nothing about how to
| design a bike. It is not uncommon in my experience that
| people mix up these two things all the time.
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is even more relevant in the LLM era. LLMs can spit out an
| answer to a question. But if you cannot understand and assess
| those claims at a deep level, you are not adding any value to
| the process.
| hinkley wrote:
| I finally put my whiteboard back up that's been down since before
| Covid. It still had scribblings of a novel merge sort with lower
| space overhead that turned out to be an artifact of non-
| representative sample inputs. As Bletchley Park taught us, humans
| are terrible at randomness.
|
| No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board
| to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is
| ferromagnetic like mine). The ones that come closest, that money
| is better spent on something else.
| scorbinnicholas wrote:
| I wonder how many nerds got his motto tattooed.
| thealch3m1st wrote:
| They should sell this as a print
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| There's something rather sad, maybe poignant about it.
|
| It stands there as a testimonial to our brevity on this planet,
| to all that we will not see, do, understand.
|
| So it goes, I guess.
| bcatanzaro wrote:
| I almost want to read it as satire. Especially juxtaposed
| against his death. Because the ideas of "What I cannot create,
| I do not understand." and "Know how to solve every problem that
| has been solved" seem profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.
| everly wrote:
| I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog:
|
| "One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never
| really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means
| the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and
| work hard to reach it. You won't. That's not just okay, that's
| the point. It's ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if
| you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will
| understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will
| die. And it will have been worth it."
|
| I don't think it's sad at all.
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| Feynman should not be celebrated.
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Why? If I recall he was a womanizer but we can admonish his
| personal choices while celebrating his incredible scientific
| and pedagogical achievements.
| NotAnOtter wrote:
| He was a top-tier scientists but kinda disgraceful in every
| other aspect of his life. Womanizer is a polite way of saying
| it, I would choose harsher words. He was also just generally
| a jerk to the people around him.
|
| Think Edison, more than Tesla.
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