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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)

#41

Post by endoblast »

gregschlom wrote: post #30
ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

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.

> "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.

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.

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

#42

Post by [deleted] »

jcranmer wrote: post #35
vonneumannstan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#43

Post by pdonis »

jcranmer wrote: post #35
vonneumannstan wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

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

#44

Post by toomanyrichies »

endoblast wrote: post #41
gregschlom wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

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.

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.

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

#45

Post by sho_hn »

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?

Let's see ... Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Bohm, Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Ehrenfest?

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

#46

Post by pdonis »

torlok wrote: post #19
esafak wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Watch the video. Feynman didn't write a single book.

I shouldn't have to watch several hours of video to see what the basis is for such an outlandish-sounding claim.

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

#47

Post by ChuckMcM »

endoblast wrote: post #41
gregschlom wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

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.

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.

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

#48

Post by pdonis »

sho_hn wrote: post #45
pdonis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Let's see ... Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Bohm, Dirac, Schroedinger, de Broglie, Ehrenfest?

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.

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

#49

Post by Dig1t »

gitremote wrote: post #8
Molitor5901 wrote: post #3

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is one of my favorite books. We lost him much too soon.

"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

I watched this video and honestly did not find any of her points very compelling.

Her best point is basically her own subjective opinion that Feynman does not belong amongst the greatest physicists of all time like Newton and Einstein. And like yeah I guess that’s sort of true. But most of the video is just stating that Feynman’s fans are weird. Feynman is super popular because he made very impressive contributions to science AND he was charismatic and inspiring. It’s the combination of both and she mostly ignores that.

Like the thing about brushing teeth and seeing things from a different point of view. She completely missed the entire point of why people think his point of view is interesting on it. Basically he’s just saying in a video that most people brush their teeth every morning, and if you view all the humans doing this from a higher vantage point, like from space, you see this line creeping across the earth and most of the people right on that line are engaged in the same ritual. It’s interesting to think about this one phenomenon from the perspective of individual humans and also from someone watching from space. She doesn’t provide a reason why this is dumb she just basically says it’s dumb and moves on to the next point. It kind of feels like she either didn’t think about it enough or is just being disingenuous.

In any case I’ve found Feynman’s work and life to be inspiring since I was a teenager. He’s inspired many people to go into physics and other sciences, which she herself states in the video, but somehow she makes that out to be a bad thing by implying the Feynman fans are weird, calling them “Feynman Bros”.

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

#50

Post by turnsout »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #9
dhosek wrote: post #2

“Know how to solve every problem that has been solved.” That seems a reasonable goal.

By who standard? It seems like an unsolvable problem to know every problem that is actually been solved correctly...

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.

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