Without looking, I would have guessed Edward Teller, but the gender thing shoots that down.
The letter was not anyway near Teller's style of writing.
Who smeared Richard Feynman?
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> during which time he attacked her Still sounds kind of vague. What, precisely, does the word "attacked" refer to?
> threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture.
That would be a form of "threatening" or maybe "menacing", and yeah, it's intimidation, but I wouldn't count it as an attack.
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture.
That would be a form of "threatening" or maybe "menacing", and yeah, it's intimidation, but I wouldn't count it as an attack.
He attacked her, AND he threw bric-a-brak, AND he smashed furniture. Not attacked her by the last two, but in addition. The man was undoubtedly brilliant, spoke well and wrote well.
I don't think it useful, or likely to be accurate, trying to presume his homelife based on his public appearance.
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
if only we could all live in a world where the highest form of domestic abuse was calculus and playing drums.
At that time, in those jurisdictions, you could only get divorced under very precise circumstances. One of the few ways was for one spouse, typically the woman, to assert "extreme cruelty." I don't know any more about this divorce than anyone else here but I do know that at the time people did whatever it took to fit in the required "extreme" criteria.
It was also a matter of mutual agreement; sometimes the husband and wife would agree to accuse each other of crap like that. You know you have terrible public policy when couples are incentivized to slander each other in order to separate amicably.
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#35Without looking, I would have guessed Edward Teller, but the gender thing shoots that down.
Was Teller a bible-swearing kind of person?
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be a form of "threatening" or maybe "menacing", and yeah, it's intimidation, but I wouldn't count it as an attack.
He attacked her, AND he threw bric-a-brak, AND he smashed furniture. Not attacked her by the last two, but in addition. The man was undoubtedly brilliant, spoke well and wrote well. I don't think it useful, or likely to be accurate, trying to presume his homelife based on his public appearance.
So, like maybe he gave her a black eye, and a fat lip? Did her clothes get ripped? Was there lasting evidence of a serious assault?
Did he knock her down a flight of stairs, and the kick her the stomach until she shat blood?
Or did he just kind of push her aside, or grab her by the wrist, and shove her around and yell a lot, after she stood in a doorway between him and his bongo drums?
Did he overpower her and then hold her down and spit in her face? That might constitute serious psychological abuse, and then again maybe it might not be abuse at all according to some people.
Maybe he put her over his knee and spanked her? (some people might enjoy that sort of thing at the time, and then complain loudly about it later)
What does "attacked" mean?
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
> threw pieces of bric-a-brac about and smashed the furniture.
That would be a form of "threatening" or maybe "menacing", and yeah, it's intimidation, but I wouldn't count it as an attack.
I've had my wife throw items at me. It definitely felt like an attack as opposed to mere threats or menacing.
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current best practice is actually to draw the black boxes, print it, then scan it back in. The result is crummy quality pdfs with no metadata or hidden text.
Well you'd think but I worked for an org back in 2005 that decided to completely optimise that step away. They were an aerospace/defense company building IFF units no less...
I think that was still a year or so before news stories started coming out about government "redacted" documents that were not actually redacted.
A lot of the NSA-related documents released after redaction were certainly run through the "redact,print,scan" routine, and I know the Navy does the same as a best practice now.
Maybe that hasn't made it out to the defense industrial base by now, but I'd be surprised if 9 years worth of being beat about the head regarding redaction mistakes wouldn't have fixed things even there.
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#39My first thought when I saw this letter was that it was Richard Feynman himself, perhaps appropriating the name of someone he knew had been interviewed. It would be entirely consistent with his character to smear himself in order to convince the government that they didn't want him -- just like the letter he wrote to the draft board proclaiming that he was not truly crazy, but was instead precisely crazy enough to no…
Accusing someone of communism in those witch-hunting days was a dangerous thing to do. It seems a bit improbable that Feynman would have done that to himself, knowing that it could jeopardise his participation in other committees/projects/areas that were of interest to him. He wasn't 'forced' to be on the PSAC, it's not like he was trying to get away from jury-duty. He could just as well have said he wasn't interested/able do participate when asked to join.
To me, it would also have seemed a bit out of character, Feynman has demonstrated that he had no big problem speaking his mind, so stealing someone's identity, with the legal risks that represents, especially if it was his estranged wife's, doesn't sound very probable.
But hey, I don't know, I guess I see it as improbable but it's always possible.
Re: Who smeared Richard Feynman?
#40Maybe not a smear...
If it were his wife, it seems just as likely she knew something of his character...