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Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

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Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#151

Post by jorvi »

hattar wrote: post #133
adastra22 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2007.185...

> 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.

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#152

Post by foxglacier »

adastra22 wrote: post #123
everly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog: “One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually…

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.

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?

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#153

Post by peterburkimsher »

hinkley wrote: post #21

I finally put my whiteboard back up that’s been down since before Covid. It still had scribblings of a novel merge sort with lower space overhead that turned out to be an artifact of non-representative sample inputs. As Bletchley Park taught us, humans are terrible at randomness. No piece of software replicates the experience of having a board to write things on (or magnet things to, if yours is ferromagnetic like mi…

Great! Would you be able to describe the sorting algorithm as a comment here, to open-source it?

Also, if you’d like a free magnet for your whiteboard, I’ll happily send you one from BeWelcome.org;)

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#154

Post by gitremote »

pdonis wrote: post #39
jcranmer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

> 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?

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."

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#156

Post by gitremote »

pkoird wrote: post #137
krferriter wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 takin…

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 an…

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.

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#157

Post by K0balt »

fknorangesite wrote: post #140
hcs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

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 subjec…

I think that “teach” has a different meaning here. There is “understanding something well enough to elaborate it in its entirety” (the technical capacity to teach it) and then there is the former + “and have the skill/talent of being able to explain it to a wide variety of other people from different backgrounds.”

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#158

Post by Syonyk »

rcxdude wrote: post #128
adastra22 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not unsolved per se, just a complex topic that resists simple explanations. (see also: what causes lift in an airfoil)

> (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

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#159

Post by gitremote »

jimbokun wrote: post #40
jcranmer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

> 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.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is not about how to do physics, and the book was ghostwritten, by a non-physicist.

Re: Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

#160

Post by wzdd »

everly wrote: post #78
JKCalhoun wrote: post #59

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.

I'm reminded of a passage from the last psychiatrist blog: “One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually…

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.
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