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…
I watched the video months ago and found it pandering and boring.
Frankly, I am extremely confident that you only watched a little bit of it.
"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
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…
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.
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.
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.
Yeah but most PhD programs aren't the Manhattan Project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought his phrase was "if you cannot teach/explain it, you do not understand it", and that this version was some late development.
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.
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 t…
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.
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 perspec…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.