4 ms·

My impression, which others may correct me on, is that he started down that road while in Los Alamos: I vaguely recall that his "You just ask them?" story was i

by Steuard 11y ago

My impression, which others may correct me on, is that he started down that road while in Los Alamos: I vaguely recall that his "You just ask them?" story was in that setting, anyway. I've always had the sense that he was deeply (and monogamously) devoted to his wife until her death. After her death, well, he says in this letter that he's had multiple girlfriends but that those relationships never went anywhere; my guess would be that he's telling his wife about precisely those early flings, and what they meant to him. But yeah, for all his brilliance and magnetism and vision, Feynman was also (eventually) pretty terrible toward women. I gaze in grateful awe and reverence at his personal contributions to human knowledge, even as I grimace in frustration and disappointment at his contributions to a culture that continues to drive too many potentially brilliant contributors away. So this letter is bittersweet to me, since it calls to mind one of the few significant areas where Feynman's life did harm to humanity rather than good. I wonder if that might have been different if his wife had lived?

Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
I know he was somewhat rakish before he married his third wife, but in what manner was he terrible to women? It takes two to tango, so his rakishness doesn't seem to imply sexism.
- DugFin 11y ago
  Yeah, you kind of have to keep the context in mind when reading about Feynman's "pick up artist" stories. Much of it takes place not only in the context of the "hook up scene", but also in the hook up scene fifty-plus years ago. The guy giving him lessons in how to pick up girls was basically telling him there's a certain process to the hook up scene, and part of it involved women taking advantage of men who will allow it. The key bit of advice was to recognize when they were pushing for freebies, and to push right back. It established a relationship of equals, which then had a fairly good chance of resulting in the casual sex both parties were ultimately looking for. From our perspective some of the behavior seems pretty crass, but that's because the subtleties of the hook up scene change over time. The cultural anchors have shifted, and what was once simply an offhand citation of the normative gender roles now sounds downright boorish.
- Steuard 11y ago
  Partly it's a matter of culture. Generations of physics students grow up seeing Feynman presented as an ideal, and in so very many ways (not just scientific!) he's a great person to emulate. But if his "rakishness" is lumped into that package as part of your vision of "an ideal physicist", that actively does harm: it encourages male students to treat the women around them like meat[0], and it gives female students a yet another signal that "physicist" and "feminine" are incompatible. This culture is pretty clearly one reason that physics lags behind almost all of the other sciences (including pure math) in approaching gender parity. And partly it really does feel like Feynman literally thought less of most of the women in his life. (On some level, that's par for the course: Feynman was an asshole to just about everyone.) Just for instance, the conclusion of that "You just ask them?" story (from memory, again) includes the observation that female college students are "no better than" women who hang around in bars, whom he had already called "whores" (and seemed to mean it). See also [0], again. Some of this is a reflection of the era when he lived. But it's a particularly vivid reflection, and it was a pretty thoroughly sexist era. When Feynman is held up as an ideal without keeping that context in mind, it can tend to propagate the shortcomings of that era into the present. It does indeed take two to tango. But nothing about that guarantees that both dancers are equals. When I tango, just for instance, tradition insists that as a man, I get to lead, and my partner's job is to do what I tell her to as gracefully as possible. It's stretching the metaphor to apply that directly here, I know (though it is unquestionably a manifestation of our society's invisible background sexism). But I suspect that most of Feynman's many lovers did not think less of him in the ways that he very explicitly learned and practiced thinking less of them. [0] Just for instance, in one of his stories, Feynman was clearly delighted by the description of a local woman in Brazil as "a sleeping dictionary", since he didn't speak Portuguese well.
pbhjpbhj 11y ago
I don't know about other theoretician's love lives but wasn't Einstein also something of a womaniser? Is there a trend, perhaps attraction to great minds coupled with the person being so deep in their work as to disrespect normal social mores?
- thesteamboat 11y ago
  See also Schrödinger's discovery of his eponymous equation.
nerd_stuff 11y ago
Feynman, 1966 (http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html): > I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry. She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it. That's almost 60 years ago that he went on record saying that pedagogical issues may be affecting women in mathematics and he had lost faith in the assumption of their inferiority. This wasn't just anybody saying this and this wasn't just any physicist saying this - this was Feynman. This was the guy the other physicists looked at in awe and it was the year after he won his Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics. Few physicists have ever earned so much respect from their peers. If that's not convicing then read how he was the one who encouraged his sister Joan to pursue science against the wishes of their mother who thought women lacked the cranial capacity to do science. (http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2003/JANUARY2003/MyMotherTheScientist.html http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2003/JANUARY2003/MyMotherTheS...) > It wasn’t until her 14th birthday—March 31, 1942— that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called Astronomy. “It was a college textbook. I’d start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again. This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that changed my life.” My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: “‘Relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.’ Cecilia Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted in a text. The secret was out, you see.” Richard was 23 or 24 when he gave her that book. Keep in mind this was the 1940's and it was the same year he received his PhD - so he wasn't just a kid and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today. When 24 years later he made the other quote in 1966 he knew women were capable scientists because his sister had already become one. This is all to say that before you take one chapter from one book out of context and extrapolate across his entire life make sure you get a few more data points to see if the extrapolation makes any sense.
kwhitefoot 11y ago
As a sort of slight compensation for his behaviour toward women in a sexual context there is always the comment made by a woman engineer who was one of his victims, see the last paragraph of the section title Feynman the Explainer on W. Daniel Hillis' essay: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...
- Steuard 11y ago
  Oh, that's a perfect encapsulation of this topic! For the lazy: > The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.
kahirsch 11y ago
"You just ask them?" was in Albuquerque during a summer after he was at Cornell, so 1946 at the earliest.[1] [1] http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/71262/34/Feynman_-_Surely_Youre_Joking,_Mr._Feynman__Adventures_of_a_Curious_Character.html http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/71262/34/Feynman_-_Sur...

by Steuard 11y ago

Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago

I know he was somewhat rakish before he married his third wife, but in what manner was he terrible to women? It takes two to tango, so his rakishness doesn't seem to imply sexism.

DugFin 11y ago
Yeah, you kind of have to keep the context in mind when reading about Feynman's "pick up artist" stories. Much of it takes place not only in the context of the "hook up scene", but also in the hook up scene fifty-plus years ago. The guy giving him lessons in how to pick up girls was basically telling him there's a certain process to the hook up scene, and part of it involved women taking advantage of men who will allow it. The key bit of advice was to recognize when they were pushing for freebies, and to push right back. It established a relationship of equals, which then had a fairly good chance of resulting in the casual sex both parties were ultimately looking for. From our perspective some of the behavior seems pretty crass, but that's because the subtleties of the hook up scene change over time. The cultural anchors have shifted, and what was once simply an offhand citation of the normative gender roles now sounds downright boorish.
Steuard 11y ago
Partly it's a matter of culture. Generations of physics students grow up seeing Feynman presented as an ideal, and in so very many ways (not just scientific!) he's a great person to emulate. But if his "rakishness" is lumped into that package as part of your vision of "an ideal physicist", that actively does harm: it encourages male students to treat the women around them like meat[0], and it gives female students a yet another signal that "physicist" and "feminine" are incompatible. This culture is pretty clearly one reason that physics lags behind almost all of the other sciences (including pure math) in approaching gender parity. And partly it really does feel like Feynman literally thought less of most of the women in his life. (On some level, that's par for the course: Feynman was an asshole to just about everyone.) Just for instance, the conclusion of that "You just ask them?" story (from memory, again) includes the observation that female college students are "no better than" women who hang around in bars, whom he had already called "whores" (and seemed to mean it). See also [0], again. Some of this is a reflection of the era when he lived. But it's a particularly vivid reflection, and it was a pretty thoroughly sexist era. When Feynman is held up as an ideal without keeping that context in mind, it can tend to propagate the shortcomings of that era into the present. It does indeed take two to tango. But nothing about that guarantees that both dancers are equals. When I tango, just for instance, tradition insists that as a man, I get to lead, and my partner's job is to do what I tell her to as gracefully as possible. It's stretching the metaphor to apply that directly here, I know (though it is unquestionably a manifestation of our society's invisible background sexism). But I suspect that most of Feynman's many lovers did not think less of him in the ways that he very explicitly learned and practiced thinking less of them. [0] Just for instance, in one of his stories, Feynman was clearly delighted by the description of a local woman in Brazil as "a sleeping dictionary", since he didn't speak Portuguese well.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago

I don't know about other theoretician's love lives but wasn't Einstein also something of a womaniser? Is there a trend, perhaps attraction to great minds coupled with the person being so deep in their work as to disrespect normal social mores?

thesteamboat 11y ago
See also Schrödinger's discovery of his eponymous equation.

nerd_stuff 11y ago

Feynman, 1966 (http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html): > I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry. She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it. That's almost 60 years ago that he went on record saying that pedagogical issues may be affecting women in mathematics and he had lost faith in the assumption of their inferiority. This wasn't just anybody saying this and this wasn't just any physicist saying this - this was Feynman. This was the guy the other physicists looked at in awe and it was the year after he won his Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics. Few physicists have ever earned so much respect from their peers. If that's not convicing then read how he was the one who encouraged his sister Joan to pursue science against the wishes of their mother who thought women lacked the cranial capacity to do science. (http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2003/JANUARY2003/MyMotherTheScientist.html http://www.aas.org/cswa/status/2003/JANUARY2003/MyMotherTheS...) > It wasn’t until her 14th birthday—March 31, 1942— that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called Astronomy. “It was a college textbook. I’d start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again. This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that changed my life.” My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: “‘Relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.’ Cecilia Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted in a text. The secret was out, you see.” Richard was 23 or 24 when he gave her that book. Keep in mind this was the 1940's and it was the same year he received his PhD - so he wasn't just a kid and supporting women in science wasn't the popularity contest it is today. When 24 years later he made the other quote in 1966 he knew women were capable scientists because his sister had already become one. This is all to say that before you take one chapter from one book out of context and extrapolate across his entire life make sure you get a few more data points to see if the extrapolation makes any sense.

kwhitefoot 11y ago

As a sort of slight compensation for his behaviour toward women in a sexual context there is always the comment made by a woman engineer who was one of his victims, see the last paragraph of the section title Feynman the Explainer on W. Daniel Hillis' essay: http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

Steuard 11y ago
Oh, that's a perfect encapsulation of this topic! For the lazy: > The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.

kahirsch 11y ago

"You just ask them?" was in Albuquerque during a summer after he was at Cornell, so 1946 at the earliest.[1] [1] http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/71262/34/Feynman_-_Surely_Youre_Joking,_Mr._Feynman__Adventures_of_a_Curious_Character.html http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/71262/34/Feynman_-_Sur...