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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)
kensai wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
There is more!
URI [1]: https://digital.archives.caltech.edu/collections/Images/1.10-3...
nav wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
"What I cannot create, I do not understand" , loved it and cropped it
up as a little picture reminder for anyone that is interested.
URI [1]: https://x.com/nav_chatterji/status/1893224035737030823
dangtheory wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
What about the rest of the blackboard? couldn't make some of it out
(right side).
shimonabi wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
He was a con artist with a Nobel Prize.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
DiogenesKynikos wrote 3 hours 58 min ago:
A "con artist" does not invent the action formulation of quantum
field theory.
bsza wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
Every person is a con artist if youâre cynical enough.
Xelynega wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
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 6 hours 17 min ago:
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.
begueradj wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
> 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 10 hours 58 min ago:
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 9 hours 25 min ago:
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. Thereâs a reason why so many
universities have their CS departments under their Math
Departments.
adultSwim wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
Feynman used his genius to build annihilation. His contemporary from
New York, Jonas Salk was a hero. Richard Feynman should be a warning.
upghost wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
Does anyone know what the comment is in the top right of the
blackboard? "why cant x sort" or something?
bsza wrote 5 hours 51 min ago:
I read it as âWhy const x sect.â (why constant cross section?),
but itâs hard to make out.
wnissen wrote 16 hours 23 min ago:
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.
Mindey wrote 16 hours 27 min ago:
Don't you see? He encoded the driving force of his motivation.
kypro wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
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, [1] He had an amazing ability to make physics fun and
entertaining. I could listen to him talk all day.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjHJ7FmV0M4
NotAnOtter wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
Feynman should not be celebrated.
frakt0x90 wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
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 18 hours 55 min ago:
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.
y1n0 wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
Knew him well, did you?
willy_k wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
And heâs celebrated for his contributions as a scientist and
educator, not to ethics or social issues. People donât disavow
Ghandi out of hand because he was anti-vax.
JKCalhoun wrote 19 hours 28 min ago:
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.
noisy_boy wrote 13 hours 15 min ago:
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 12 hours 57 min ago:
Confucius â 'We have two lives, and the second begins when we
realize we only have one.'
everly wrote 18 hours 19 min ago:
I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog:
âOne 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 wonât. Thatâs not just okay, thatâs the point.
Itâs 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.â
I don't think it's sad at all.
crazygringo wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
> 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 1 hour 5 min ago:
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 44 min ago:
> 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.
wzdd wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
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.
adastra22 wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
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.
ozfive wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
Of course, some desires are straightforward. But if every want
was just about the thing itself, marketing departments would be
out of a job.
foxglacier wrote 12 hours 7 min ago:
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?
everly wrote 12 hours 49 min ago:
That's fine
adastra22 wrote 12 hours 43 min ago:
It shouldn't be expressed as a universal then: "you never
really want an object, you only want the wanting"
everly wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Sounds like you've got this all buttoned up
kayvulpe wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
Related:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_petit_a
bcatanzaro wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
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 18 hours 1 min ago:
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.
JKCalhoun wrote 12 hours 52 min ago:
Feynman has a comment in one of his two autobiographies where he
describes an argument with an artist friend â 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 â 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 â
"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
â like I used to as a young boy.
Funny when I later came across "When I Heard the Learnâd
Astronomer".
jstanley wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
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.
jszymborski wrote 15 hours 45 min ago:
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 15 hours 18 min ago:
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 14 hours 43 min ago:
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
thealch3m1st wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
They should sell this as a print
hinkley wrote 20 hours 55 min ago:
I finally put my whiteboard back up thatâs 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 11 hours 55 min ago:
Great! Would you be able to describe the sorting algorithm as a
comment here, to open-source it?
Also, if youâd like a free magnet for your whiteboard, Iâll
happily send you one from BeWelcome.org;)
hinkley wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
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.
ChuckMcM wrote 21 hours 10 min ago:
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.
TZubiri wrote 15 hours 42 min ago:
I thought his phrase was "if you cannot teach/explain it, you do not
understand it", and that this version was some late development.
somat wrote 16 hours 18 min ago:
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 15 hours 33 min ago:
It's impossible, even for Feynman, to understand how to create
everything. In your example the Amish idea of "we" is religious
bias â 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.
hcs wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
> "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 13 hours 3 min ago:
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 11 hours 28 min ago:
I think that âteachâ has a different meaning here. There is
âunderstanding something well enough to elaborate it in its
entiretyâ (the technical capacity to teach it) and then there
is the former + âand have the skill/talent of being able to
explain it to a wide variety of other people from different
backgrounds.â
pmarreck wrote 16 hours 56 min ago:
My version of this was realizing at some point "What I can
understand, I can control"
baxtr wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
Love his books!
Although, it seems like heâs getting a bad rep these days. How did
that happen?
PS: Iâm referring to that video that pops up on top when you google
him for example.
halgir wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
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.
elteto wrote 14 hours 47 min ago:
He was misogynistic and, by his own admission, did not hold women
in high regard. I donât remember exactly but I think he even
admitted that at some point in his life he didnât 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 5 hours 16 min ago:
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.
> âDuring the conference I was staying with my sister in
Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, âI canât
understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. Itâs all
so complicated.â
> âNo,â she said, âwhat you mean is not that you canât
understand it, but that you didnât invent it. You didnât
figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you
should do is imagine youâre a student again, and take this
paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations.
Then youâll understand it very easily.â
> 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.â [1]
URI [1]: http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2017/04/richard-f...
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman
adastra22 wrote 15 hours 26 min ago:
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. Iâm not going to watch
that. Can you link to the negative stuff youâre seeing?
baxtr wrote 10 hours 48 min ago:
That is the one I was talking about. Watching the first 5 minutes
is enough I think.
scintill76 wrote 8 hours 32 min ago:
Iâve watched 2 Angela Collier videos on him albeit in the
background â youâd probably have to watch the whole thing
to truly understand the âbad repâ and I canât 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 6 hours 33 min ago:
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 4 hours 47 min ago:
Ironically Richard Feynman is an example of a physicist
that doesnât succumb to that disease.
Maybe thatâs why Angela Collier doesnât like him?
Reminds me of how a lot of astronomers despised Carl Sagan.
jimbokun wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
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.
gregschlom wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
> "What I cannot teach, I do not understand"
And the corollary to that, from 17th century French writer Nicolas
Boileau: "Ce que l'on conçoit bien s'énonce clairement, et les mots
pour le dire arrivent aisément." - What we understand well, we
express clearly, and words to describe it flow easily.
lloeki wrote 8 hours 51 min ago:
> 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.
FilosofumRex wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
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.
cyberax wrote 17 hours 57 min ago:
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 16 hours 12 min ago:
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.
drewzero1 wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
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."
cyberax wrote 14 hours 14 min ago:
> 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.
jkaptur wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
Nate Bargatze has a great standup routine about this:
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5X1m16-Jvc&t=204s
endoblast wrote 20 hours 5 min ago:
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.
hiq wrote 17 hours 40 min ago:
"We can know more than we can tell."
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polanyi's_paradox
ChuckMcM wrote 19 hours 54 min ago:
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.
toomanyrichies wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
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.
stahorn wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
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 8 hours 48 min ago:
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 7 hours 30 min ago:
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 4 hours 0 min ago:
>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'.
pmarreck wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
So forgive the pedantry but what was your takeaway?
fouronnes3 wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
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 :)
Brian_K_White wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
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.
stahorn wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
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.
vacuity wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
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.
yarekt wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
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 isnât at all related to âdoing it
wellâ in some cases.
For example, in film, being a great director requires a deep
insight about acting, so they can explain whatâs needed from
a performance to an actor. A director may know what they need
despite being unable to perform it themselves.
fma wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
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.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 7 hours 4 min ago:
All my best teachers were trained as teachers, and werenât
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 âstupid.â
Since a significant part of my learning, is asking âstupidâ
questions, this did not go well for me, and I took an
Incomplete. I had a 4.0, to that point.
> âThe only stupid question is the one you donât ask.â
From a poster in one of my tech school classrooms.
tomthe wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
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.
gosub100 wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
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".
jonahx wrote 18 hours 1 min ago:
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.
somat wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
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 15 hours 31 min ago:
One of the reasons you canât get good at riding a bike by
reading about it is that we literally donât understand the
mechanics of bike riding. Itâs a currently unsolved problem
in physics. Google it if you do t believe me!
So I get what youâre saying, but it is maybe not the
optimal example.
transcriptase wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
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.
hattar wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
URI [1]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsp...
jorvi wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
> 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 1 hour 52 min ago:
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.
gsf_emergency_2 wrote 13 hours 46 min ago:
MATLAB Code from the authors:
(There's no rider however)
URI [1]: http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bic...
rcxdude wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
It's not unsolved per se, just a complex topic that resists
simple explanations. (see also: what causes lift in an
airfoil)
Syonyk wrote 11 hours 21 min ago:
> (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
adastra22 wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
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.
gsf_emergency_2 wrote 17 hours 26 min ago:
Looks like here's an opportunity for a language to express the
riding of bikes
Headstart (modelling the non-riding of bikes):
URI [1]: http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/bicycle_m...
bitshiftfaced wrote 21 hours 19 min ago:
Does anyone know if this was his personal blackboard? For example,
would've his students seen this blackboard?
leonewton253 wrote 21 hours 39 min ago:
"What I cannot create, I do not understand."
"Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.â
sigmoid10 wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
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.
painted-now wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
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 5 hours 34 min ago:
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.
wildzzz wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
Watching the most brilliant professors struggle to convert a word doc
to PDF highlights that exact same phenomenon.
gmueckl wrote 19 hours 38 min ago:
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.
mkagenius wrote 20 hours 50 min ago:
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.
asdff wrote 19 hours 2 min ago:
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 13 hours 2 min ago:
I especially liked the pointless masses.
ddtaylor wrote 20 hours 12 min ago:
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.
Molitor5901 wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is one of my favorite books. We lost
him much too soon.
CSMastermind wrote 15 hours 42 min ago:
I hate how his books have been censored after his death. Always try
to find first editions.
Xelynega wrote 8 hours 37 min ago:
What has been censored in them?
CSMastermind wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
Surely Youâre 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.
Conscat wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
Instruction manual on negging women from the perspective of an
abuser.
Sincere6066 wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
It makes me so sad to read opinions like this.
jmcgough wrote 18 hours 46 min ago:
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.
DiogenesKynikos wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
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.
speff wrote 18 hours 12 min ago:
Reminds me of this quote by Stephen Gould
> I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions
of Einsteinâs 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?
jandrese wrote 21 hours 3 min ago:
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.
Xelynega wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
> 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?
mkagenius wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
Murray Gelman used to hate him.
Freeman Dyson loved him.
(Both nobel prize winners)
vonneumannstan wrote 20 hours 43 min ago:
Dyson has won nearly every award other than the Nobel.
gitremote wrote 21 hours 38 min ago:
"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!"
URI [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
__s wrote 55 min ago:
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)
gowld wrote 17 hours 46 min ago:
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 8 hours 40 min ago:
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
FredPret wrote 18 hours 24 min ago:
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 17 hours 59 min ago:
That is not all want the video is about.
zelphirkalt wrote 18 hours 37 min ago:
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.
Dig1t wrote 19 hours 47 min ago:
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 thatâs sort of true.
But most of the video is just stating that Feynmanâs fans are
weird. Feynman is super popular because he made very impressive
contributions to science AND he was charismatic and inspiring.
Itâs 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
heâs 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. Itâs interesting to think about this
one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also
from someone watching from space. She doesnât provide a reason
why this is dumb she just basically says itâs dumb and moves on
to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didnât think
about it enough or is just being disingenuous.
In any case Iâve found Feynmanâs work and life to be inspiring
since I was a teenager. Heâs 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 âFeynman Brosâ.
speff wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
Frankly I'm having trouble believing you watched the video if you
make the assertion:
> Heâs 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 âFeynman Brosâ.
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 heâs 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. Itâs interesting to
think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of
individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She
doesnât provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically
says itâs dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels
like she either didnât 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 17 hours 20 min ago:
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.
gitremote wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
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.
speff wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
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)
furyofantares wrote 20 hours 14 min ago:
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.
vonneumannstan wrote 20 hours 45 min ago:
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.
krferriter wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
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 13 hours 35 min ago:
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]
URI [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Tapes-Research-Chemist-...
URI [2]: https://feynman.com/stories/al-seckel-on-feynman/
Xelynega wrote 9 hours 2 min ago:
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)
gitremote wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
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 3 hours 43 min ago:
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.
roadbuster wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
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
divisionâhe 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 didnât know that. That
may not
be correct, but thatâs what I heard." [1] Feynman's grasp
of mathematics was astounding
URI [1]: https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/...
NotAnOtter wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
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.
Sincere6066 wrote 19 hours 12 min ago:
You should try actually watching the video before writing a
manifesto.
jcranmer wrote 20 hours 24 min ago:
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.
DiogenesKynikos wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
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.
vonneumannstan wrote 19 hours 34 min ago:
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.
pdonis wrote 19 hours 58 min ago:
> 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 19 hours 37 min ago:
> 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.
URI [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/02/14/science/einstein-...
pdonis wrote 16 hours 34 min ago:
> Einstein excelled in school.
hotdogscout correctly clarified that I meant university,
not grade school. Sorry for the ambiguity on my part.
hotdogscout wrote 17 hours 35 min ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2...
jimbokun wrote 20 hours 9 min ago:
> 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 11 hours 17 min ago:
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is not about how to do
physics, and the book was ghostwritten, by a non-physicist.
WesolyKubeczek wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
It's âghostwrittenâ by the same measures interviews
are. There exist recordings of Feynman telling the stories
to Ralph Leighton.
gitremote wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
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 20 hours 9 min ago:
> 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?
gitremote wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
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 10 hours 58 min ago:
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.
sho_hn wrote 19 hours 56 min ago:
Let's see ... Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg,
Bohm, Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Ehrenfest?
pdonis wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
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.
AnimalMuppet wrote 16 hours 19 min ago:
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 15 hours 26 min ago:
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.
cyberax wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
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 16 hours 32 min ago:
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. :-)
furyofantares wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
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 19 hours 32 min ago:
I watched the video months ago and found it pandering and
boring.
Xelynega wrote 8 hours 58 min ago:
Pandering to whom?
furyofantares wrote 16 hours 3 min ago:
Frankly, I am extremely confident that you only watched a
little bit of it.
sympil wrote 19 hours 16 min ago:
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.
archermarks wrote 20 hours 35 min ago:
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 20 hours 34 min ago:
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.
Xelynega wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
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
wholinator2 wrote 18 hours 1 min ago:
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
ThrowawayR2 wrote 21 hours 5 min ago:
And his Nobel Prize, the highest possible acclamation by his peers.
The people eager to tear him down seem to overlook that.
Xelynega wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
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?
speff wrote 20 hours 54 min ago:
One minute and thirty seconds into the video: "Amazing Nobel
Prize winning physicist"
ThrowawayR2 wrote 21 hours 6 min ago:
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 20 hours 55 min ago:
The video is a critical look at the legend of Richard Feynman,
not his work. You should watch it.
dralley wrote 21 hours 9 min ago:
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 17 hours 58 min ago:
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.
Xelynega wrote 8 hours 48 min ago:
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"
memhole wrote 12 hours 15 min ago:
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.
dralley wrote 15 hours 45 min ago:
Yeah but most PhD programs aren't the Manhattan Project.
esafak wrote 21 hours 13 min ago:
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."
lemonberry wrote 19 hours 40 min ago:
"He lived, he died, the rest is anecdote"
torlok wrote 20 hours 58 min ago:
Watch the video. Feynman didn't write a single book.
pdonis wrote 19 hours 55 min ago:
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 19 hours 29 min ago:
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 16 hours 35 min ago:
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 8 hours 54 min ago:
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
sympil wrote 21 hours 42 min ago:
I found this to be illuminating:
URI [1]: https://youtu.be/TwKpj2ISQAc?si=O0qabLdBkmWq3jVX
bookofjoe wrote 21 hours 44 min ago:
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 19 hours 29 min ago:
Seriously? That is so cool that you were there. Sad that we lost
him fairly young. Such a legend, I love his work.
dhosek wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
âKnow how to solve every problem that has been solved.â
That seems a reasonable goal.
WorkerBee28474 wrote 13 hours 18 min ago:
Sounds like Feynman would enjoy LeetCode.
hinkley wrote 20 hours 52 min ago:
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 couldnât make it fit
that meant we didnât 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 couldnât
teach you in class because you and your coworkers are going to write
the âbookâ. Or at least make money because not enough people have
figured âitâ out to make it cheap.
gowld wrote 17 hours 52 min ago:
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.
WalterBright wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
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 1 hour 29 min ago:
_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.
iterance wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
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.
femto wrote 17 hours 1 min ago:
> 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".
readthenotes1 wrote 21 hours 34 min ago:
By who standard? It seems like an unsolvable problem to know every
problem that is actually been solved correctly...
turnsout wrote 19 hours 45 min ago:
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.
cbracketdash wrote 21 hours 31 min ago:
I think he's being sarcastic
bitshiftfaced wrote 21 hours 14 min ago:
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 20 hours 57 min ago:
dhosek was being sarcastic, not Feynman
danielmarkbruce wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
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".
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