[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 : 477 points
Date : 2025-02-21 18:22 UTC (1 days 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.
| gowld wrote:
| You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress
| into an intro series.
|
| I think you are describing undergrad vs graduate, not intro
| vs upper level, and even that is optimistic. Even tenured
| professors are still learning new things about what is
| already known to the world at large.
| femto wrote:
| > You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of
| progress into an intro series.
|
| Reductionism can lead to simplification, which will take
| less time to teach and learn.
|
| Take planetary orbits as an example. There was a time when
| people would have spent a lot of time learning about all
| the complicated movements the planets make through the sky,
| "spheres within spheres", retrograde movement and so on.
| These days we teach Newton's laws of gravity and a
| heliocentric model (both of general application). The
| motion of the planets then pops out almost for "free".
| iterance wrote:
| Modern physics has actually done it quite well. This is
| because the core of many physics concepts revolve around
| general principles which can be taught directly or by
| example. A modern undergraduate education in classical
| mechanics teaches concepts around symmetry and energy that
| generalize to other areas in physics (for instance, the
| notion of a potential well giving rise to bound states
| reappears several times in different problem domains). A
| modern undergraduate optics education generalizes enough
| that students should readily understand concepts like
| evanescent waves and acousto-optical modulation.
|
| It's only when one moves away from these principles to
| something more subtle or less well-understood that the
| education becomes hairier. But as these are further
| characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau &
| Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate
| level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly
| available to the advanced undergraduate due to better
| compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I suspect one can. This is because "progress" is pretty
| much never in a straight line from New York to San
| Francisco. It meanders all over the place, in circles,
| around the horn a few times, bumping into Africa, until it
| eventually blunders into San Francisco.
|
| Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight
| line.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| _Eventually_ you can take the straight line, probably.
| But the process needs time to contract the unnecessary
| steps. There's still things we haven't completely
| contracted, is my feeling.
|
| Also, we shouldn't be so quick to throw away the original
| process of discovery. If our goal is to make scientists
| that can discover i think it'd be best to expose them to
| some of the real discovering. Like, the way fermi-dirac
| statistics is presented typically leaves out the rich
| process of discovery and understanding that took place,
| similarly with einsteins field equations. It leads young
| students into the thought that the big names are great,
| eldritch gods, completely incomprehensible in their
| genius. It begins to feel like you could never ever have
| made the discovery, because what you learned was not the
| discovery, it was the sum of 70 years since. I felt a
| great weight lift watching the sean carroll talk about
| _how_ Einstein made his equations. He explained the logic
| of each step, the assistance he needed to reach critical
| points, and generally made it human. I believe it was an
| RI talk. Then i remember some video about the process to
| find FD statistics to resolve the ultraviolet catastrophe
| and it was so enlightening. They aren't old gods, they're
| people that worked for decades to reach completely
| reasonable goals and we just don't teach it like that at
| all. It's incredibly discouraging to new students to
| never see that these people were mere mortals.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| Sounds like Feynman would enjoy LeetCode.
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| I see. In a strict sense, yes, published books like
| Surely You're Joking and its sequel, The Feynman
| Lectures, QED, etc. weren't "written" by Feynman himself.
|
| But the statement "never wrote a book", without a lot of
| context (which might be in the video or Gleick's
| biography, but wasn't in the post I responded to),
| suggests that Feynman didn't _create the content_ that 's
| in the books, but someone else did and Feynman took
| credit for them. That is emphatically _not_ the case. All
| of the _content_ of those books is Feynman 's. Leighton
| took Feynman's content, delivered orally, and put it into
| publishable book form. Certainly not a negligible task,
| and he deserves credit for it, but it doesn't mean the
| books aren't Feynman's content. They are. And nobody,
| certainly not Leighton, ever said otherwise.
| Xelynega wrote:
| I don't think the problem people have is "Richard Feynman
| didn't produce content"
|
| It's "the content that people interacted with that they
| formed an opinion on "Richard Feynman" from was actually
| editorialized and published by other people"
|
| They're not trying to take credit from Feynman, theyre
| trying to divorce the character of "Feynman" as written
| by these authors from the real historical person
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| It wasn't for the worst either. Frankly i think it's
| essential for people to have experience in some
| mischeviety. Hacker mindset, etc, etc. I've joined a PhD
| program recently and you can really tell who's never done
| anything but study.
| dralley wrote:
| Yeah but most PhD programs aren't the Manhattan Project.
| memhole wrote:
| I would agree. I think at least in some fields a certain
| cleverness is needed. Mathematics is all about being
| clever and testing assumptions as an example.
| Xelynega wrote:
| You should read some of the more egregious stories that
| have been published with his blessing.
|
| It's not just "experience in mischeveity", it's "being a
| general nuisance, then everyone clapped"
| 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"
| Xelynega wrote:
| Who is trying to "tear him down"?
|
| All I see is people trying to point out the differences
| between "Richard Feynman the character" and "Richard
| Feynman the real person"
|
| "Richard Feynman the character" would talk about how he
| goes to parties and is able to befuddled people in their
| native languages that he doesn't speak.
|
| "Richard Feynman the person" was a nobel prize winning
| physicist
|
| Do his tall tales have to be true for his nobel prize to be
| valid? Or can he be lying for his ego while still being a
| good scientist?
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| 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
| Xelynega wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Frankly, I am extremely confident that you only watched a
| little bit of it.
| Xelynega wrote:
| Pandering to whom?
| 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.
| pdonis wrote:
| 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. :-)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| pessimist wrote:
| 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.
| arcadi7 wrote:
| Rutherford, planck , bohr jumpstarted the 20th century
| physics .
| gitremote wrote:
| 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."
| pdonis wrote:
| 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.
| 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.
| gitremote wrote:
| _Surely You 're Joking, Mr. Feynman!_ is not about how to
| do physics, and the book was ghostwritten, by a non-
| physicist.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| It's "ghostwritten" by the same measures interviews are.
| There exist recordings of Feynman telling the stories to
| Ralph Leighton.
| gitremote wrote:
| 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.
| 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...
| hotdogscout wrote:
| 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...
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Einstein excelled in school._
|
| hotdogscout correctly clarified that I meant university,
| not grade school. Sorry for the ambiguity on my part.
| 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.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| 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.
| 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
| krferriter wrote:
| 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.
| pkoird wrote:
| 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/
| gitremote wrote:
| 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.
| pkoird wrote:
| 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.
| Xelynega wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| fromMars wrote:
| Did you read the book? Some of those are distortions.
|
| Regarding the negging incident, she left out important
| context in her summary of this part of the book.
|
| Feynman went to a bar where it was clear that some of the
| women at that bar were intending to use men to get free
| drinks and food. In the incident he described, a woman
| asked him to buy three sandwiches and a drink at a diner
| and then says she has to run to go meet up with a
| lieutenant (taking the sandwiches with her). His negging,
| was to ask for her to pay for the sandwiches if she had
| no intention of staying and eating with him. Basically,
| not being a pushover.
|
| Secondly, he states right after that in the book, "But no
| matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used
| it after that. I didn't enjoy doing that."
|
| I also think the incident about lying about whether he
| was a student while at Cornell was exaggerated. Feynman
| was 26 at the time and his wife had just died. In the
| anecdote about the dance, he mentions that some girls
| asked him if he was a student, and after getting rejected
| by others at the dance, he says "I don't want to say" and
| two girls go with him back to his place. But later he
| confesses, "I didn't want the situation to get so
| distorted and misunderstood, so I let them know I was a
| professor".
|
| Overall, I don't find strong evidence of the claims that
| he was a misogynist or abusive to women in the book
| outside of his frequenting of a strip club, which may be
| enough for some people, but, I think people don't realize
| how different people's attitudes were to things like
| nudity and sex in the 70s and early 80s before AIDs was a
| thing.
| speff wrote:
| I hadn't read the book fully, but I did coincidentally
| read that chapter a long time ago. Given the context you
| provide, I agree that he does not seem to be worse than
| anyone else given the time period. The problem is when
| people read about him and try to adopt mid-1900s values
| in the 2000s - and that's really what the video above
| about his legacy is about.
|
| (also I'm fairly pro people-visiting-the-strip-club even
| though I've never been)
| gitremote wrote:
| It's misogynistic, because the ghost writer of _Surely
| You 're Joking Mr. Feyman!_, Ralph Leighton, ultimately
| put into print narratives that encouraged men to see
| "ordinary" women as "worthless bitches". In the character
| of "Feynman":
|
| _Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I
| get the idea. All during the next day I built up my
| psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those
| bar girls are all bitches, that they aren 't worth
| anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to
| buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a
| goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such
| worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was
| automatic._
|
| ...
|
| _On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the
| master 's lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you
| don't feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who's trying
| to get you to buy her drinks but a nice, ordinary,
| Southern girl?_
|
| _We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said,
| "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one
| thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?"_
|
| _" Yes."_
|
| _So it worked even with an ordinary girl!_
|
| The story about direct consensual sex with one "ordinary
| girl" doesn't validate that men should have misogynist
| attitudes towards ordinary women. It's just confirmation
| bias. It matters, because training your mind to be
| misogynist until it's automatic would spill over into
| other aspects of your life, like how you treat female
| coworkers.
| 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.
| tovej wrote:
| She's a phd in physics, I think we can safely say that she
| has a curious mind.
| 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
| sympil wrote:
| That is not all want the video is about.
| gowld wrote:
| That YouTuber seems quite bitter, making videos complaining
| about famous scientists and complaining about people lke
| Worlfram and Musk who studied physics in school and then
| became successful in business -- not for being bad
| businessman or bad people (which some of them may well be),
| but because she's offended that they say they love physics
| even though she thinks they don't deserve to.
| Xelynega wrote:
| Elon Musk has a bachelor in science and business, I feel
| like a PhD scientists is allowed to complain about the
| media going to Elon Musk for science views rather than
| scientists
| __s wrote:
| Overall seems good, but I find it interesting she says it
| teaches to always be the smartest person in the room when the
| book often reflected Feynman as being somewhat simple, going
| on about reliance on mental tricks in comparison to his
| colleagues who he felt were much more talented. Or instances
| where he found himself out of his depth & got lucky
| _(pointing at some random thing on a diagram to figure out
| what it is without asking, happens to get people he 's with
| to rubber duck debug an actual problem)_. Which may support
| her observation of Feynman bros who might find this relatable
|
| This all comes back to the observation I've made working with
| competent people, which is that we're all stuck trying to
| solve problems with the computational power of a slab of meat
|
| _(she later goes on to address this modesty as being
| underhanded)_
|
| _(continued watching, two hours in now, this is great work)_
| 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.
| Xelynega wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Is this not an undesirable trait in non fiction stories?
| 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?
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Most of these complaints about Feynman come down to one
| story he told. People who come away thinking Feynman is a
| misogynist generally miss the point of the story. Feynman
| talks about how when he was young, an older friend told him
| he could pick up women by being a jerk. He tried it, and it
| worked, but he felt bad about himself afterwards and
| decided not to do it any more.
|
| Some people look at that story and say, "Look at what a
| jerk Feynman was to the lady in the story!" And then they
| completely ignore the part where Feynman says that even
| though the method was effective, he didn't feel right using
| it.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I hate how his books have been censored after his death. Always
| try to find first editions.
| Xelynega wrote:
| What has been censored in them?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman? is the most heavily
| edited.
|
| Gell-Mann famously threatened to sue Feynman if he didn't
| alter his book which he did in later printings.
|
| The parts of the Cargo Cult Science chapter that referenced
| specific scammers were removed out of fear of a defamation
| lawsuit.
|
| The Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Path
| chapter in which he discusses picking up women at bars was
| removed after the first edition.
|
| All of Surely You're Joking received a pass to change the
| language of the book in order to "remove sexist and
| misogynistic language".
|
| What Do You Care What Other People Think? was also altered
| to remove his descriptions of his first wife and broadly
| the language of the book was also updated.
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I especially liked the pointless masses.
| 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.
| wildzzz wrote:
| Watching the most brilliant professors struggle to convert a
| word doc to PDF highlights that exact same phenomenon.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| My CS professor in grad school was once struggling to set up
| a classic analog overhead projector, so I taunted him about
| it: "sooo, you can debug 1M lines of C code, but you
| can't...."
| painted-now wrote:
| I think there is some huge difference between learning some
| bleeding edge ideas vs stuff that -for years - has been
| repackaged, processed, and optimized for being taught and for
| making exams out of it.
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| The thing is, most of Feynman's work (in particular the stuff
| he received the Nobel prize for) has not really made it into
| undergraduate courses, despite being decades older and going
| through a lot more repackaging and processing. But the
| quantum hall effect is so simple by comparison that it is
| taught in early QM courses. So the key takeaway here is that
| there were still pretty low hanging fruits in physics two
| decades after Feynman won the Nobel.
| spoonfeeder006 wrote:
| Maybe has more to do with volume of information rather than it
| being especially difficult for him? Could be that was his
| week's todo list
| 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 :)
| jonahx wrote:
| Literature professor = bike argument?
|
| That's were I put my money, but I could see it going either
| way.
|
| This can devolve into a definitional argument, but I
| actually think it's fair to say we _don 't_ understand how
| we ride a bike. We have many abilities and fluencies we
| don't understand, or only partially understand, in the
| sense that we can't break them down into pieces easily and
| transmit the information. That perspective feels more
| accurate to me than saying I understand how I ride a bike
| because I can ride a bike, though in common usage the
| phrase "I understand how to ride a bike" would be perfectly
| acceptable.
|
| The subtle distinction between the phrase "knows how to"
| and "understands" hints at the difference here.
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| Looks like here's an opportunity for a language to
| express the riding of bikes
|
| Headstart (modelling the non-riding of bikes): http://rui
| na.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mechani...
| somat wrote:
| We(by which I mean a person who knows how to ride a bike)
| do understand how to ride a bike. The problem in
| communicating that is a riding a bike is a skilled act.
| that is you cant get good at riding a bike by reading
| about it, and it is very hard to describe a well trained
| skill, it boils down to "practice a lot" which makes
| nobody happy.
| adastra22 wrote:
| One of the reasons you can't get good at riding a bike by
| reading about it is that we literally don't understand
| the mechanics of bike riding. It's a currently unsolved
| problem in physics. Google it if you do t believe me!
|
| So I get what you're saying, but it is maybe not the
| optimal example.
| rcxdude wrote:
| It's not unsolved per se, just a complex topic that
| resists simple explanations. (see also: what causes lift
| in an airfoil)
| adastra22 wrote:
| Sibling comment to yours points to a relatively recent
| (this century) article with a mostly complete theoretical
| model for bike self-stability. There are other theories
| though, some more or less developed than others. It turns
| out to be a fiendishly hard control-theory problem, and
| at least one aspect is chaotic. Which theory is correct
| has not, to my knowledge, been definitively determined by
| experiment. Until it is, I think it is fair to say that
| it is unsolved.
|
| Unlike lift, which is very well understood but often
| poorly explained.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _(see also: what causes lift in an airfoil)_
|
| That's easy! It pushes air down, and the reaction force
| is what we call lift!
|
| ... now, _why_ it pushes air down... there be many
| computational fluid dynamics PhDs... though "angle of
| attack" covers a lot, and the rest is just efficiency
| tweaks.
|
| Good question for teachers who insist it's the Bernoulli
| Principle: "But my paper airplane has flat wings and
| flies just fine!" _toss across classroom_
| hattar wrote:
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2007.
| 185...
| gsf_emergency_2 wrote:
| MATLAB Code from the authors:
|
| (There's no rider however)
|
| http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_mech
| ani...
| jorvi wrote:
| > This conservative non-holonomic system has a seven-
| dimensional accessible configuration space and three
| velocity degrees of freedom parametrized by rates of
| frame lean, steer angle and rear wheel rotation.
|
| I always adore the split between how my brain does things
| instinctually, but making it arbitrary completely
| demolishes the 'natural' flow of it. Same with complex
| ball throwing / bouncing trajectory calculations.
|
| It also immediately makes me angry about how we teach
| math. When you learn about powers (squares, cubes, roots,
| etc), these things are just written out as arbitrary
| concepts instead of displaying them geometrically.
|
| Hell, when I was first taught the Pythagorean theorem, it
| was just explained by drawing a triangle with A2 + B2 =
| C2, without also drawing out the related squares of each
| side. Immediately doing that would instill so much more
| intuition into the math. In general, mathematical
| concepts gain so much clarity by doing them
| geometrically.
| necovek wrote:
| Sounds like a problem with your early math tutors:
| especially with geometry, all the examples you bring up
| have been taught with "what it means".
|
| I mean, squares and cubes are just multiplication by the
| same factor: I distinctly remember even trapezoid
| surfaces, pyramid volumes being demonstrated by chopping
| and piecing parts together.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Even if we could perfectly and accurately explain the
| mechanics and mathematical representations of riding a
| bike, it would still be useless knowledge even to the few
| people capable of understanding it in terms of utility in
| riding one.
| gosub100 wrote:
| That's a great rebuttal. But if the actual claim is "I
| cannot teach..." It is still consistent. No one is claiming
| to teach you how to ride a bike or be in a relationship or
| know when to leave a party. "I cannot teach what I cannot
| understand" is not the inverse: "I can teach everything I
| understand".
| stahorn wrote:
| I took up social dancing in my 20s, including salsa and
| Argentinian tango. I think that it is a very good way to
| experience the difference between being very good at
| something and being able to teach.
|
| I've been on courses with some people that are clearly
| exceptionally good at dancing but are a bit lacking when it
| comes to teaching. Then I've had the pleasure of having
| teachers that, while still very good at dancing, would not
| win the high level competitions. When it comes to teaching
| though, they are just wonderful to be around. They are
| exceptionally good at spotting what you are doing wrong and
| giving you an explanation of how to fix it. Not only that,
| but they make you feel good about learning.
|
| One concrete memory I have is from a cuban salsa dancer
| trying to teach me, a poor northern European, how to move
| like a cuban. His frustration was very noticeable and not
| making it easier for me! Then an example of the other type
| of teach, is the crazy Australian tango dancer that not
| only had fantastically fun and simple workshops, but also
| spotted and explained simple fixes. When I was struggling
| with a move, he told me to rotate my foot, which I did, and
| I stopped struggling. When us attendees in the class talked
| about some high level move being complicated, he said that
| it is not at all complicated, and showed us how it's
| simpler than it appears.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| All my best teachers were trained as teachers, and
| weren't necessarily content experts.
|
| One of the worst teachers I ever had, was a genius Calc
| II teacher, who was an abusive asshole, and would
| humiliate students for asking questions he deemed as
| "stupid."
|
| Since a significant part of my learning, is asking
| "stupid" questions, this did not go well for me, and I
| took an Incomplete. I had a 4.0, to that point.
|
| _> "The only stupid question is the one you don't ask."_
|
| From a poster in one of my tech school classrooms.
| tomthe wrote:
| It is not sufficient to understand the content very well,
| you also have to understand the state of the mind of your
| pupils very well.
| fma wrote:
| If you consider professional sports as an example, the
| best coaches were not the best players and vice versa.
| The saying "Those who can't do, teach" is such a shallow
| representation of reality perpetuated by those who can do
| neither.
| yarekt wrote:
| Great insight, it actually aligns with the conversation
| above: Yes, teaching is its own skill regardless of the
| subject matter, but to teach you really have to
| understand the subject matter really well, and isn't at
| all related to "doing it well" in some cases.
|
| For example, in film, being a great director requires a
| deep insight about acting, so they can explain what's
| needed from a performance to an actor. A director may
| know what they need despite being unable to perform it
| themselves.
| vacuity wrote:
| I think teaching requires not only that you understand
| how to do something, but also what someone else's
| incomplete understanding is. You need to address the root
| cause as to why the other person's understanding is so
| lacking, like your examle with the tango dancer, instead
| of pointing out that a move is wrong and not giving the
| tools to prevent it. There may be many paths to reaching
| similar understandings, and a teacher needs to be able to
| tame this sprawling diversity. That's one reason why we
| don't just get blog posts or films that are exceedingly
| short, because if everyone could just understand a dry
| delivery of the core points instead of needing to think
| through multiple examples and reasons, we wouldn't be so
| pressed about teaching.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I would say that if you can't explain on a blackboard how
| to ride a bicycle, then that simply means you do not
| understand how to ride a bicycle. You can do a thing
| without understanding it. I would guess very few bike
| riders really understand what all makes the act work even
| though they all can perform the act.
|
| Maybe no one can _learn_ how to ride a bike purely from a
| blackboard but that is a seperat issue about physicality.
|
| But the quote is really about understanding, and the forces
| and effects that go into the act of riding a bike are both
| understandable and explicable. Anyone who understands them
| can describe them on a blackboard. So the quote holds water
| even in the case of riding a bike.
|
| I would say anyway.
|
| Maybe there are other examples and bike riding just wasn't
| the best example to invalidate the quote.
| 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.
| pmarreck wrote:
| So forgive the pedantry but what was your takeaway?
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| One of the big takeaways was not to _over_ -value the
| knowledge I had gained learning English via immersion in
| an English-speaking culture, and conversely not to under-
| value that of the local teachers, who had gained their
| knowledge in the classroom. It's a cliche at this point
| to say that "street smarts > book smarts", at least in my
| culture. My teaching job taught me that there are
| situations where neither type of knowledge by itself is
| sufficient, and that both types have their place.
|
| For example, as I mentioned I frequently ran into
| situations where I could tell whether a student's
| sentences were correct or not, but I struggled to explain
| why. One example from early in my teaching career was
| when students would place their adjectives out-of-order,
| for example "The German, red, old, large car..." instead
| of "The large, old, red, German car...". I intuitively
| knew that the former is incorrect and the latter is
| correct, but when students would ask me why, I struggled
| to articulate a reason.
|
| But the local teachers on staff (i.e. native Chinese
| speakers) would chime in with "The order of adjectives in
| English is opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin,
| material, and purpose." They (the local teachers) still
| made mistakes in _their_ English, but they had mostly
| memorized the rules from classroom study, and could
| recite them better than I could. Which was helpful to
| both us as native speakers (who wanted to give the
| students concrete answers to their questions) and to the
| students (who wanted rules to govern future scenarios
| they might encounter).
|
| I was admittedly a bit cocky coming into that job,
| thinking I was qualified simply because I was a native
| speaker. I quickly learned that teaching a subject is a
| skill unto itself. It requires abilities like gauging
| levels of understanding by asking comprehension
| questions, and tailoring the subject matter to those
| comprehension levels, so as not to either talk down to
| the student or talk over their head.
| stahorn wrote:
| As someone that speaks English as my second language, the
| trick of English is to memorize all the exceptions and
| then accept that the English spelling is just made up to
| mess with foreigners.
|
| Looking at you, the "b" in debt, that I was pronouncing
| for a long time growing up and learning a lot of words
| from reading.
| somenameforme wrote:
| A big one is also "ed" like "jogged". It looks like jog
| ged, so surely it's pronounced that way. Bahaha, no -
| gotcha! It's jogd! But we like extra letters and there
| must be vowels even when completely and absolutely
| unpronounced. Not sure if this is better or worse than
| Russian which seems to have no problem with squeezing a
| half dozen consonants side by side and saying, 'good
| luck.'
| encipriano wrote:
| Honestly English spelling is the worst at least of
| Western Europe. Its so bad it that unless you know some
| IPA and learn the words pronunciation one by one youre
| misunderstood all the time. Its also imposible to guess
| with 100% accuracy how a word is said unless being told.
|
| Schwas everywhere randomly (why is it adjust (uhd 'juhst)
| and not ad 'juhst when we have accept (ak 'sept). In
| German this is way more consistent. Diphthongs
| everywhere, almost no pure monophthongs. Which is a
| language feature but in written form is also fucked. I
| tend to have problems with oh vs aa sounds. E.g. poland
| is pou luhnd and polish is paa lish. Stress isnt written.
| Consonants not only can be spelled differently but also
| said differently. Gif vs djif, cell vs celt, china vs
| machine
|
| This makes the language way harder in a high level than
| it should be if it had had some spelling reform at some
| point. Sorry for not using IPA Im on the phone.
| dessimus wrote:
| >E.g. poland is pou luhnd and polish is paa lish.
|
| There's two pronunciations of 'polish' though: the one
| you mentioned being what one does to grandmother's
| candlesticks, and 'pou lish' referring to someone or
| something from 'pou luhnd'.
| 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.
| hiq wrote:
| "We can know more than we can tell."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi's_paradox
| cyberax wrote:
| One my personal trick: imagine that you are magically
| transported into the 19-th century (or earlier). Can you
| teach the subject to a well-known scientist of that era?
|
| E.g. if you want to explain radioactivity to somebody from
| 1860-s, how would you do that? Or for math, how would you
| explain calculus to Archimedes?
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually
| struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time,
| is any of my technological knowledge or understanding even
| remotely useful?
|
| Like, sure, germ theory is great I guess, but I have no
| idea how I'd begin to explain the internal combustion
| engine (which I'm fairly sure requires pretty advanced
| metallurgy) let alone something as esoteric as solar
| panels. Hell, how do you generate electricity? I could
| mumble something about waterwheels, a coil of wires, and a
| large magnet, but I have no idea how you'd begin to go
| about sourcing a large magnet. Industrial-scale mining of
| Africa/Australia, maybe?
|
| Like, I know a lot, and I could explain a good amount about
| how a lot of this works conceptually, but I couldn't even
| begin to explain how to actually _engineer_ it. As far as I
| 'm concerned, solar panels come from factories.
| jkaptur wrote:
| Nate Bargatze has a great standup routine about this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X1m16-Jvc&t=204s
| cyberax wrote:
| > Those both seem much easier to me than what I usually
| struggle with: Transported back to a pre-industrial time,
| is any of my technological knowledge or understanding
| even remotely useful?
|
| That's an interesting topic, and there's a whole
| community that is interested in this. Mostly for
| historical and educational reasons.
|
| Surprisingly, there are quite a few things you can
| reasonably do. You will never be able to build a useful
| internal combustion engine starting in a pre-industrial
| time. But you'll be able to introduce the positional
| decimal notation (took 4000 years to invent!), double-
| entry bookkeeping, paper making, printing press.
|
| If you know a bit of technology, then you can create
| water plumbing (just avoid lead), and at least some
| metalworking.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| This thought experiment reminds me of Mark Twain's novel
| "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which
| the main character is a 19th-century American man
| transported back to 6th-century Britain. He used his
| experience in firearms manufacture to introduce modern
| weapons and had bicycles constructed for the knights to
| ride around on. I always thought it was pretty farfetched
| that he'd be able to recreate such complex technology
| without the aid of modern tools, much less set up
| factories to manufacture it in pre-industrial times. But
| it is a bit fun to imagine someone using knowledge of
| modern technology to pose as a wizard. As Arthur C Clarke
| famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
| indistinguishable from magic."
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Nineteenth century kit wouldn't really be all that
| difficult to replicate with the materials available in
| the early middle ages. Even the precision stuff of the
| time, you can make a surface plate just by scraping an
| iron sheet. With a surface plate you can make everything
| else you need. The hard part would be higher quality
| metallurgy, but it's certainly doable, the Chinese were
| making cast iron as early as 5th century BCE. Even steel
| was possible with even Bronze Age equipment.
| FilosofumRex wrote:
| He was a life long teacher so if he believed teaching is
| understanding, he'd have said so.
|
| Making or building is a much deeper level of understanding in
| real life than teaching would ever be, ergo - those who can't
| do, teach.
| lloeki wrote:
| > What I cannot teach, I do not understand
|
| > What we understand well, we express clearly, and words to
| describe it flow easily.
|
| And the other side of the coin to both is a powerful trick to
| really nail a topic you feel like you have gaps on: get the
| basics and teach it / explain it to someone; you then _have
| to_ explain it clearly thus _have to_ fill all the gaps.
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| Love his books!
|
| Although, it seems like he's getting a bad rep these days. How
| did that happen?
|
| PS: I'm referring to that video that pops up on top when you
| google him for example.
| adastra22 wrote:
| All the first page results of my Google search are positive,
| except for the one video (not near the top of the results)
| that has a provocative title but is 2 hours long. I'm not
| going to watch that. Can you link to the negative stuff
| you're seeing?
| baxtr wrote:
| That is the one I was talking about. Watching the first 5
| minutes is enough I think.
| scintill76 wrote:
| I've watched 2 Angela Collier videos on him albeit in the
| background -- you'd probably have to watch the whole
| thing to truly understand the "bad rep" and I can't speak
| to how widespread the bad rep is.
|
| My memory is, misogyny, cringey stories that were surely
| greatly exaggerated and just happen to make Feynman the
| smartest guy in every room, kind of a jerk in general,
| divorce due to claimed domestic violence, never did the
| work of writing a book personally but has the reputation
| of being a prolific author, his pop appeal makes people
| elevate him to the very top minds of physics when the
| work of others was much more impactful.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| I haven't watched this particular video, but Angela
| Collier's channel seems to be unfortunately going the
| typical way of pop-physicists, like Neil deGrasse Tyson,
| Sabine Hossenfelder, etc. - becoming famous for their
| physics-related content, and then assuming they're an
| expert at everything because they are physicists, and
| physics explains everything. It seems to be a rare
| physicist ( _possibly_ Sean Carroll) that 's in the
| public eye, that doesn't succumb to this disease.
|
| The fault lies partly with the viewers and commenters,
| ascribing a similar level of expertise to their
| platitudes and ill-informed takes on, for eg. AI, as to
| their actual field of expertise. But they don't exactly
| discourage that either, and in some cases lean into it
| actively. It's at least a hopeful sign that the descent
| into "physicist disease" isn't especially rapid in
| Angela's case, physics still being the primary topic on
| the channel, but it's still disappointing all the same.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Ironically Richard Feynman is an example of a physicist
| that doesn't succumb to that disease.
|
| Maybe that's why Angela Collier doesn't like him? Reminds
| me of how a lot of astronomers despised Carl Sagan.
| tovej wrote:
| She's the only youtube physicist I can stand, to be
| honest. Much better than Tyson, and much, much better
| than Hossenfelder, who's turning out to be a complete
| crank. Collier is matter of fact, cites her sources, and
| has non-hot takes on whatever non-physics topic she's
| talking about (e.g. AI). Sure, she gets the terminology
| wrong, but she gets the main thrust of the matter right.
| I say that as a computer science researcher who's
| concerned about AI ethics.
|
| And her video on Feynman is detailed and worth watching.
| She goes through evidence from court cases of Feynman
| strangling his wife, of how Ralph Leighton created much
| of this myth of Feynman by fanboying him. And she gives
| him the benefit of the doubt as well, presenting him as
| flawed, but human.
| elteto wrote:
| He was misogynistic and, by his own admission, did not hold
| women in high regard. I don't remember exactly but I think he
| even admitted that at some point in his life he didn't
| believe women could be scientists, or at least not as good as
| men. I think that by the end of his life he had matured and
| outgrown this.
|
| He was deeply affected by the death of his first wife. I
| personally believe that he developed misogynistic traits as a
| way of self-defense and driven by the pain of her loss. They
| were deeply in love. His farewell letter to her is so
| beautiful and touching, and yet so pragmatic, in a way that
| only Feynman could be.
|
| He is a personal hero but I do understand he was human and as
| such, a flawed individual like anyone else.
| matt_j wrote:
| Given that his sister Joan was an accomplished scientist in
| her own right, and they got along well, I don't think your
| comment is accurate.
|
| > "During the conference I was staying with my sister in
| Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I
| can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying.
| It's all so complicated."
|
| > "No," she said, "what you mean is not that you can't
| understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't
| figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you
| should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this
| paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the
| equations. Then you'll understand it very easily."
|
| > I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing,
| and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been
| afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult."
|
| http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/04/richard-
| feynm...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman
| halgir wrote:
| Personally, I experienced a rude awakening when reading his
| book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". I've read part of
| his lectures, and heard great things about him in general. So
| I was extremely surprised when his own collection of
| anecdotes painted him as kind of a shitty human, in my
| opinion.
|
| Very much an example of "never meet your heroes" for me.
| tovej wrote:
| He hasn't written a single book (surprising I know), I assume
| you're talking about "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman",
| which contains exaggerated anecdotes designed to make Feynman
| look like a hero. That one was written by a fanboy (Ralph
| Leighton) based on stories that Feynman told him, which have
| been revealed to be either fake or exaggerations (they found
| notes in his office of him writing and rewriting these hero
| stories).
|
| It's a terrible book, in my opinion. If you want to know why,
| Angela Collier says it better and in more detail than I
| could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
|
| Is that the video you're referring to? Watch the video and I
| think you'll see why he is "getting a bad rep these days".
| pmarreck wrote:
| My version of this was realizing at some point "What I can
| understand, I can control"
| hcs wrote:
| > "What I cannot teach, I do not understand"
|
| I tend to agree, but teaching another person is also a whole
| different set of skills from being able to drive something
| yourself.
|
| One prominent example is the "curse of knowledge"; it may take
| a lot of practice becoming a beginner to be able to teach for a
| beginner's perspective in your area of expertise.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| God, thank you. I _really_ dislike the old aphorism that if
| you can 't teach something you don't understand it.
|
| Teaching is a whole complicated skill unto itself, especially
| if one is teaching to beginners. Like (since we're on HN),
| how easy is it to imagine someone very good at programming
| but would be a terrible choice as a Comp Sci 101 prof? I'm
| guessing "very."
|
| The whole idea deeply undermines teachers of all subjects.
| K0balt wrote:
| I think that "teach" has a different meaning here. There is
| "understanding something well enough to elaborate it in its
| entirety" (the technical capacity to teach it) and then
| there is the former + "and have the skill/talent of being
| able to explain it to a wide variety of other people from
| different backgrounds."
| somat wrote:
| A similar thing I heard about the amish, is that it is not that
| they are anti technology, it is that they Don't want technology
| they can't control, basically if unable to make from raw
| materials they don't want it.
|
| Now I don't think this is entirely the way things are, I
| suspect there is a core of truth with a lot of religion and
| tradition surrounding it. But I have a lot of sympathy for
| wanting to have the freedom that control over your environment
| grants you. Personally I would hate to give up my tech. and
| remain a willing slave to the manufactures.
| guelo wrote:
| It's impossible, even for Feynman, to understand how to
| create everything. In your example the Amish idea of "we" is
| religious bias -- each Amish individual doesn't know how to
| create everything, they choose to rely only on other Amish,
| shunning the knowledge of others. "we" can also take on
| patriotic bias, as in, "we" don't build anything anymore
| because it's all made in China, thus excluding China from
| that "we". The fading globalist dream of the 90s was that
| "we" could include everybody on our little planet.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I thought his phrase was "if you cannot teach/explain it, you
| do not understand it", and that this version was some late
| development.
| jelder wrote:
| There's another corollary that always struck me as true:
|
| "To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees." -- Paul
| Valery
|
| Posted on HN recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40700530
| 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.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Great! Would you be able to describe the sorting algorithm as a
| comment here, to open-source it?
|
| Also, if you'd like a free magnet for your whiteboard, I'll
| happily send you one from BeWelcome.org;)
| hinkley wrote:
| Typically you merge a block A and block B into a new block C
| that has the same length as A + B. I thought I saw a way to
| use a few extra pointers and some swap operations to turn A
| and B into C by chipping away at their left ends, and still
| being a stable sort. The examples I came up with worked and
| confirmation bias took over. But in real data there were
| combinations of runs that broke the algorithm.
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| If you are calling Richard Feynman "profoundly unwise" and
| "endlessly futile", you might need to do a bit more
| reflection on the grounding for your opinion.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Surely it can be true that a profoundly wise and
| consistently effective person holds a belief or utters a
| phrase that is profoundly unwise and endlessly futile.
| ScotterC wrote:
| Absolutely true. And paradoxically, they may fully
| understand that the phrase is profoundly unwise and
| endlessly futile and yet know the benefit of holding the
| belief anyway.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Isn't there an implicit "... that you stumbled upon, and
| found interesting".
|
| And to him (and others like him), that might have been
| possible.
|
| While for other more ordinary people, it'd be profoundly
| unwise and endlessly futile, to hope to do that
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Feynman has a comment in one of his two autobiographies
| where he describes an argument with an artist friend --
| about, I think, the beauty of a rose. His friend believed
| that "dissecting" the rose, breaking it down to its
| biological components chemical processes, took away from
| the beauty of the rose.
|
| Feynman disagreed -- couldn't understand how knowing _more_
| about the thing could possibly take away from it.
|
| It was the one thing I read from him where I disagreed with
| him. It seems strange to me he didn't see naivety, wonder
| as things someone might cherish. Those are things that you
| are in danger of losing when you come to know too much.
|
| I'm probably belaboring my point, but I remember when I was
| in my 20's pointing out to my girlfriend at the time some
| of the more well known constellations in the night sky.
| They were not well know to her. I'd try to point to a star,
| point to another -- "There, that's Scorpio. You can see the
| one reddish star, Aldebaran in the center..."
|
| No, she could not see it. Christ, like Orion, I can't look
| up at the night sky in winter and _not_ see it. What does
| she see in the sky at night?
|
| Oh, that's right, an amazing jumble of mysterious points of
| light -- like I used to as a young boy.
|
| Funny when I later came across "When I Heard the Learn'd
| Astronomer".
| jstanley wrote:
| This comment went the exact opposite of the direction I
| was expecting.
|
| Do you also find that you enjoy magic tricks less when
| you know how they're done?
|
| Personally I find the "not knowing" kind of painful. I
| can't imagine cherishing ignorance.
| localhost wrote:
| You can listen to him talk about it!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo
| 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.
| kayvulpe wrote:
| Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_petit_a
| adastra22 wrote:
| I once wanted to learn how to change the oil in my car. I
| learned, and then I changed the oil in my car. It was never
| about wanting to want to learn about my car.
| everly wrote:
| That's fine
| adastra22 wrote:
| It shouldn't be expressed as a universal then: "you never
| really want an object, you only want the wanting"
| everly wrote:
| Sounds like you've got this all buttoned up
| foxglacier wrote:
| After you learnt it, did you keep on feeling good about
| that forever or did it just fade away into the pile of
| other things you don't care about anymore while you went on
| to want to learn new things?
| ozfive wrote:
| Of course, some desires are straightforward. But if every
| want was just about the thing itself, marketing departments
| would be out of a job.
| wzdd wrote:
| That is the sort of quote which gives psychiatry a bad name.
| Of course people want (and achieve) things, label-referrent-
| object wordplay aside, and of course people come to learn
| things, despite there being an infinite level of skill
| achievable. Imagine if instead of talking about kung foo
| they'd said "peeling potatoes", or "crossing the road", or
| "taking a shower". Same paradoxes around completion, but
| somehow less mysteriously unmasterable.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you
| never really want an object, you only want the wanting_
|
| ...no it 's not?
|
| Much of traditional psychoanalysis has been superseded by
| modern psychotherapy. And I'm not even familiar with that
| idea being part of psychoanalysis in the first place. (And
| there are many schools of psychoanalysis that disagree with
| each other too.)
|
| Quite frankly, it's not a great insight. It's perfectly fine
| to want something and then get it. Don't worry, you'll want
| something else afterwards. The idea that you should set your
| sights on an impossible goal doesn't hold up to the slightest
| logical scrutiny here. And a lot of people get disillusioned
| or burned out from trying to achieve impossible things and
| failing.
|
| Modern psychotherapy is actually about aiming for
| _achievable_ , realistic goals in your life. It's much more
| in line with the serenity prayer, in terms of aiming for
| realism:
|
| _God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
| change, the courage to change the things I can, and the
| wisdom to know the difference._
| everly wrote:
| It's from a 10+ year-old blog post so I wouldn't expect it
| to be in line with modern psychotherapy.
|
| It's an insight that has stuck with me since then and seems
| to strike a chord with others when shared, regardless of
| whether or not it's "great".
|
| Of course it's fine to want something and then get it. Last
| night I wanted a Klondike bar so I walked to my freezer and
| got one. This misses the point entirely.
|
| Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought they
| wanted and still feeling unfulfilled.
|
| I appreciate your point about the serenity prayer, I think
| there's something relevant there for sure.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Plenty of examples of people getting what they thought
| they wanted and still feeling unfulfilled._
|
| Right, I think that's what might be striking a chord.
|
| Modern psychotherapy would tell you that you'd picked
| something thinking it would solve problems that it never
| would. A classic example is that if you achieved a
| certain career objective or measure of success, you would
| feel loved and approved of and worthy. And then when you
| achieve it, you don't.
|
| The answer is _absolutely not_ to pick a goal you can 't
| achieve. That's completely wrong.
|
| The answer is to understand that career or professional
| success will not make you feel loved. That if you feel
| like you have an unmet need for love and approval, you
| need psychotherapy to understand where that is coming
| from in terms of your childhood, current relationships,
| etc.
|
| And then you can reframe your professional or career
| goals as something else entirely. And when you reach one,
| you can feel proud and then set another one. You won't
| have a feeling of emptiness or unfulfillment, because
| you'd never set unrealistic expectations for what that
| achievement would provide.
| hamburglar wrote:
| It's possible these are both right. You should pick
| achievable goals which will actually make you happy, and
| you should pick impossible goals that you will always
| enjoy working towards.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| We don't have much time and it takes too long to get that until
| there is too little left. The latter is the tragedy.
| mentos wrote:
| Confucius -- 'We have two lives, and the second begins when
| we realize we only have one.'
| 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.
| willy_k wrote:
| And he's celebrated for his contributions as a scientist
| and educator, not to ethics or social issues. People don't
| disavow Ghandi out of hand because he was anti-vax.
| y1n0 wrote:
| Knew him well, did you?
| kypro wrote:
| I'm sure a lot of people here have already seen this, but for
| those who haven't I highly recommend you watch this video of
| Feynman explaining light,
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4
|
| He had an amazing ability to make physics fun and entertaining. I
| could listen to him talk all day.
| Mindey wrote:
| Don't you see? He encoded the driving force of his motivation.
| wnissen wrote:
| Quite interesting to see [Hans] Bethe Ansatz on there. I wasn't
| familiar with it, apparently it started as an Ansatz and Bethe
| corrected it into a theory. But this all happened more than ten
| years before Feynman was doing physics.
| upghost wrote:
| Does anyone know what the comment is in the top right of the
| blackboard? "why cant x sort" or something?
| bsza wrote:
| I read it as "Why const x sect." (why constant cross section?),
| but it's hard to make out.
| adultSwim wrote:
| Feynman used his genius to build annihilation. His contemporary
| from New York, Jonas Salk was a hero. Richard Feynman should be a
| warning.
| begueradj wrote:
| > Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.
|
| I wonder how developers nowadays can related to that since -some
| of them- relate on AI to watch it doing their craft.
| Shorel wrote:
| They don't, and they can't. They don't even know that they
| can't.
|
| The mathematics mindset and the programming mindset could not
| be more different.
|
| Writing a mathematical proof is similar to writing everything
| from scratch each time.
|
| However, and this is a serious affirmation: learning to write
| mathematical proofs will make anyone a much better developer,
| because of the changes in the mental processes involved in the
| creation and expression of ideas.
| MisterSandman wrote:
| What? Every mathematical proof is built on top of other
| proofs, especially when you look at research that is
| happening today.
|
| Mathematics and Computer Science mindsets are closer than
| most other pairs of academic streams. There's a reason why so
| many universities have their CS departments under their Math
| Departments.
| xanderlewis wrote:
| These days it's more like math departments under CS
| departments (which are seen as highly important, as a CS
| degree is more fashionable than a maths one and mathematics
| is seen as an abstruse academic pursuit in the worst sense
| and a financial sink rather than a source).
|
| It's true that (almost) every proof is built on top of
| others, but this is not the way mathematicians learn their
| craft -- you do have to _start_ at the bottom.
|
| The average programmer, on the other hand, has never been
| anywhere near the hardware or, these days, the software
| near the bottom.
| shimonabi wrote:
| He was a con artist with a Nobel Prize.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
| Xelynega wrote:
| It's interesting having this video be my introduction to
| Feynman, then seeing how people talk about his personality.
|
| She brings up points that don't seem easy to dispute, yet all
| of the comments here seem to be praise for the man outside of
| just his achievements.
| ballooney wrote:
| This website is 99% the sort of not especially socialised
| young men who for various psychological insecurities are
| prone to the sort of hero-worship that she refers to in the
| video.
| bsza wrote:
| Every person is a con artist if you're cynical enough.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| A "con artist" does not invent the action formulation of
| quantum field theory.
| dangtheory wrote:
| What about the rest of the blackboard? couldn't make some of it
| out (right side).
| nav wrote:
| "What I cannot create, I do not understand" , loved it and
| cropped it up as a little picture reminder for anyone that is
| interested.
| https://x.com/nav_chatterji/status/1893224035737030823
| kensai wrote:
| There is more!
| https://digital.archives.caltech.edu/collections/Images/1.10...
| EncomLab wrote:
| Anyone know why it seems that Feynman is coming under attack
| lately - most prominently by You Tuber Angela Collier whose "the
| sham legacy of Richard Feynman" now has nearly 1M views? I don't
| understand it at all.
| afterburner wrote:
| If you watch it all the way to the end (or skip towards the end
| if you like), she does mention this legacy is a result of
| exaggerated stories not even written down by him, but related
| second hand by people around him with their own attitudes (and
| financial inventives). He was probably not an angel, even a bit
| of a cocky dick maybe sometimes in the way of the times, and
| perhaps a bit vain, but stories related second hand when he was
| probably joking around don't necessarily represent the true
| history of his life.
|
| She has good things to say about him in the end, from the
| evidence of his actual behaviour, like doing education outreach
| and loving his wife.
| tovej wrote:
| Well, for one, he strangled his wife when he got upset:
| https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/richard-feynman-physica...
| paulpauper wrote:
| Too bad he did not live that exceptionally long despite such an
| exceptional mind and accomplishments. Life is weird in that way.
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