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Joan Feynman has died
- ponker 6y agoIncredible to see the resemblance with her brother Richard.
- 0xfaded 6y agoIts warming to see the impact that early positive mentorship can have over the span of a lifetime. I don't mean to say that without her brother she wouldn't have achieved great things. However, I think it's extraordinarily likely that he helped her find a passion that lead her all the way to the forefront of her field.
- enriquto 6y agoAre you sure about that? Your wording sounds a little disparaging of her achievements. According to her wikipedia entry she was actually discouraged by her family to pursue a scientific career.
- Cilvic 6y agoThe article details that the positive part was her brother Richard Feynman (i love reading / watching him), while her mother is said to have been discouraging.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ascar 6y agoThat's some first class cherry picking you did on the Wikipedia article. Here is the full relevant paragraph: "Like her brother, Joan was an inquisitive child, and she exhibited an interest in understanding the natural world from an early age. However, her mother and grandmother both dissuaded her from pursuing science, since they believed that women's brains were not physically capable of understanding complex scientific concepts in the way that men's brains could. Despite this, her brother Richard always encouraged her to be curious about the universe. It was he who originally introduced young Joan to auroras when, one night, he coaxed her out of bed to witness the northern lights flickering above an empty golf course near their home. Later, Feynman would find comfort in an astronomy book given to her by her brother. She became convinced that she could, in fact, study science, when she came across a graph based on research by noted astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman
- enriquto 6y agoYou are right! I got lost reading the three references after "...in the way that men's brains could.", and did not read the rest of the paragraph. The first reference is amazing, with some cool photos of the two siblings.
- 0xfaded 6y agoSorry for the wording, because I specifically didn't want to say that. My belief is that there is a huge amount of human potential left on the table because young people don't have access to good mentors.
- F_J_H 6y agoNo need to apologize. What you said was very clear, and the other commenter has apologized for not fully reading the information, which led to a misguided interpretation of your comment.
- fs111 6y agoI read "Surely your joking Mr. Feynman" a few years ago, but to this day I somehow never knew he had a sister that was an accomplished scientist.
- Cilvic 6y agoI'm reading it at the moment too, loving it! Maybe halfway through he hasn't mentioned her once I believe. Edit: See below how she is mentioned.
- pjc50 6y agoWhile Richard Feynman's anecdotes are great entertainment, after a while you realise that the common theme is how great Richard Feynman is.
- mac01021 6y agoWell isn't the book just a compilation by RF's friend, constructed from interview sessions? I'm sure RF had a healthy ego, but I don't think he can be blamed entirely for this feature of the book.
- pistoriusp 6y agoOdd, I fondly remember him mentioning her, and how important she was as a voice of reason to him. Update: I went looking for sources in the PDF, I've add them to the parent post. She was mentioned frequently. I actually even recall this story about the Auroras, but I cannot remember where I've heard it.
- ManuelKiessling 6y agoWell,that probably says a lot about her brother...
- pistoriusp 6y agoMaybe take the time to verify the assumption that his sister is not mentioned before jumping to a conclusion.
- sohkamyung 6y agoFor more on Joan Feynman, read this extract about her from the book, "A Passion For Science: Tales of Discovery and Invention". I especially liked this part: > [A] thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK!” [1] https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of-discovery-and-invention/joan-feynman-from-auroras-to-anthropology/ https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of...
- ascar 6y agoAmazing read. Thank you! Inspiring how her brother encouraged her into sciences after she got completely crushed by her mother. From the same extract: \begin{quote} “Women can’t do science, because their brains aren’t made for it,” Lucille Feynman declared to her eight-year-old daughter Joan. The news was a huge blow to the little girl’s ambitions which, at the time in 1935, were firmly set on following her brother Richard into a life scientific. “I remember sitting in a chair and weeping,” she recalls. [...] The path of Joan’s life would be changed significantly one night when Richard woke her up and told her to get dressed and follow him out into the street. He took her away from the house and the street lights and out onto a wide open golf course nearby with a big dark sky above them. “I can still remember in my mind’s eye the green lights dancing in the sky”, Joan recalls of the flickering northern lights Richard had lead her outside to witness. “He told me that it was an aurora and no one knew what caused it exactly.” In that moment, she was hooked. And whilst the doubts about a woman’s abilities to undertake a career in science, planted in her by Lucille, remained, Joan’s interest in science continued to be fuelled by Richard’s progress through university. Before he’d left home, her brother had made a deal with her that whilst away at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying for his bachelor’s degree, he would answer any science question that she sent him. “For quite a while we had a notebook which went back and forth, and he sent me a problem in maths and I sent the answer,” remembers Joan of that time. Then for her fourteenth birthday, he gave her the book ‘Astronomy’ by Robert Horace Baker. “It was a book people studied at college,” she remembers. “And he’d pasted my name in it. I was so excited.” Somewhat daunted by the advanced level of the book, Joan wrote to Richard to ask how she should read it. He replied that she should start at the beginning and read until she didn’t understand, and then start at the beginning again. And each time she’d get a little further. “So I did,” says Joan, “and I got a little further each time. And then one day there was a figure in the book of a spectrum and underneath it said ‘the relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms… of Stellar Atmospheres from the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’.” The caption was a revelation to Joan. Cecilia was a woman’s name, and the hyphenated family name indicated she was married. It was proof that a married woman was capable of doing science. \end{quote} I also find this little excerpt about how she encouraged scientific thinking in her children inspiring: > [...] Joan was determined to instil a sense of curiosity and wonder in her own children. > Her son Charles remembers one occasion when, at the age of about six, he asked her about her job as a scientist. In response Joan handed him a spoon. “Drop it on the table,” she said. Charles let it fall. “Why did it fall? Why didn’t it float up to the ceiling?” asked Joan. It had never occurred to Charles that there was a whyinvolved. “Because of gravity,” she continued. “A spoon will always fall, a hot-air balloon will always rise.” Charles dropped the spoon again and again until she made him stop. The boy had no idea what gravity was, but the idea of “why?” kept rattling around in his head.
- DrBazza 6y ago"For her fourteenth birthday, Richard gave Feynman a copy of Astronomy by Robert Horace Baker, a college-level physics text, that both taught her about physics and what was possible: Feynman credited a figure attributed to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin for proving to her that women could indeed have a career doing science." Fun fact: the new HS2 tunnel boring machine in the UK is named after Cecilia.
- Quai 6y agoAwesome woman, and a fascinating family! I'm no expert, so excuse my ignorance: Wasn't the "origin" of auroras know long before her time? I recall reading about Kristian Birkeland's terrella experiment where he demonstrated how the earths magnetic field would "focus" particles from the sun around the poles. Of course, this does not change the fact that she was a great scientist, and did important discoveries about aroras and astronomy in general.
- aneutron 6y agoUpon reading "Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman !" and "What do you care what other people think ?", I have become somewhat of a fan of Mr. Richard Feynman. (Despite it being against his idea about idolizing people). But throughout the two books, his relationship with his sister, Joan Feynman, was an extremely intriguing once. They were both brilliant, and they both encouraged each other. I got the impression that he, being the person to refuse authority and conforming with the pre-established, always came back to his sister for an opinion on how to handle "mere humans". And it showed in the second part of his story about the Challenger investigation. May she rest in piece.
- xutopia 6y agoRest in *peace.
- throwaw4y-plate 6y agoI don't think it would be very comfortable to rest in a null pointer.
- aneutron 6y agoUnfortunately, very embarrassing mistake that's there forever now.
- mmhsieh 6y agono need for embarrassment for you. radical idea here: the point of language is for a person to put the ideas from his head into the head of another person. so long as the idea is conveyed, it is successful. piece/peace distinction in spelling only matters when there is a real risk of ambiguity in intended meaning. everyone new what you meant -- so it was OK!
- reaperducer 6y agoNot radical at all. It goes back at least to the early 1900's. Big newspaper owners like Colonel McCormick wanted to convey meaning by using fewer letters, thus saving on ink and paper costs. They invented alternate spellings to suit their purposes. Most died out, but a few have stuck with us, like using "thru" for "through."
- tuyguntn 6y agoIs there any reading related to how their parents raise them with such a passion to science? (I believe geniuses can be raised)
- dennis_jeeves 6y ago>I believe geniuses can be raised I believe the opposite. Nature vs nurture thing... Not saying that encouragement, environment etc. does not play a role, it does.
- EthanHeilman 6y agoWhat about the third opinion timing and luck. You are exposed to the right sets of ideas at the right time and your brain through random chance happens to take a particularly fruitful paths to explore the ideas creating an exceptionally useful mental model. You have emotional preconditions that cause you to process this success in a helpful rather than a harmful way. This feeling of success and excitement causes you to spend more time daydreaming about the subject, slowing building a reservoir of powerful and useful mental patterns. Someone can daydream 10-16 hours a day for 14 years, but it is very hard to find someone that can study a subject they don't like for 8 hours a day for 5 years straight. I would argue that studying a subject is less likely to result in new ideas than day dreaming. Due to having an environment to grow these ideas, not being run over by a car, having the money to pursue schooling, and exploring a field which is undergoing a revolution at the time you could up 'a genius'. Would anyone outside of Academic Physics know Feynman's name, if he entered Physics in 1995 when much of the low hanging fruit had already been harvested? One could argue that Grothendieck is a counter example to this argument because he grew up in very harsh conditions that for the most part actively suppressed his learning. However I would claim Grothendieck for the luck and timing argument for four reasons: First the trivial argument, if Grothendieck had starved to death while hiding from the Nazis as a child no one would name him as a genius. Second, when he started college he was doing very poorly and he almost gave up, but he had mentors and an early success that enabled his later successes. What if he had gotten a cold that stopped him from that early success. It seems likely that given different friendships in college he would have dropped out and never been heard from. Third, he was very interested in political movements and dedicated much of his life to it. However, he was not particular good at this. If he had an early success in a political tract he wrote, it likely would have led him into an area that he would not have succeeded in as much as Mathematics. Fourth, French Mathematics at the time was undergoing a revolution because so many of the older Mathematicians had died in WW1 and WW2. This created opportunities for younger Mathematicians to rapidly advance their careers and these younger Mathematicans were critical to Grothendieck not being sidelined.
- crifex 6y ago:(
- mohit888 6y agoReally a great read. Its a huge loss!!!
- comment_ran 6y agoRichard and Joan had a good father. Clearly, both of them were influenced by the father. ``` Feynman: But my father, you see, interested me in patterns at the very beginning, and then later in things, like we would turn over stones and watch the ants carry the little white babies down deeper into the holes. We would look at worms. All the time playing — when we’d go for walks, we’d look at things all the time, and then he’d tell me about things of every kind. The stars, the bugs, geometry things, and so on. He was always telling me interesting things — the way birds fly, the way ocean waves work, or something, you see, the weather. I don’t know why, any more, but there was always talking about the world, from every angle. Not just mathematics or anything like that, but the whole business he was interested in, and he was always telling me things. So he therefore developed somehow, inside me, more or less naturally, an interest in anything rational and scientific. ... Weiner: That’s very interesting. Evidently your father’s influence spread. Feynman: She said that it was because she would overhear us talking, and then she would ask me things, and I would explain it to her. That’s what she says. It wasn’t so direct in her case. ```
- _prototype_ 6y agoThis somewhat explains why the black community is under represented in science.
- kelnos 6y agoIt is telling, though, that Richard was directly influenced by his father, but Joan had to get that influence secondhand.
- thesz 6y agoWhat does it tell? Joan and Richard were born 9 years apart. Richard was more interesting to his father because he was older. Being eighteen, one clearly can understand more than at nine years old.
- tehjoker 6y agoPour one out for a real one. Rest in peace Joan Feynman.
- rcarmo 6y agoWhy is there no black bar on the site? (she may not have been in CS or tech as we know it, but...)
- rcarmo 6y agoWhat is the point of downvoting this sort of thing? Is there no openness to discussing it?
- progman32 6y agoPart of the issue may be that the community doesn't know what the current rules are for activating the black bar. So it's difficult to discuss productively. I'd be surprised if there's any bad faith here. Anyone know how it works?
- rcarmo 6y agoWell, I give up. Seriously. Got downvoted twice for no real reason (as far as I can tell). This is why I’m always ambivalent/afraid to post direct questions/opinion on HN.
- codezero 6y agoThat’s a bummer. I used to work in solar physics so met her a few times and coauthored a conference proceeding with her. She was an exceptional scientist.
- Konohamaru 6y agoOoooh, no black bar for the womanly scientist. Is it because the female gender is too smooooth and pettable and it might overwhelm the handsome young men here?
- dang 6y agoYou've repeatedly posted flamebait and unsubstantive comments and used multiple accounts to break HN's guidelines. We ban accounts that do those things, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Konohamaru 6y agoOk. I'll keep things in order from now on.
- MattGrommes 6y ago> Feynman was married with two children and, having not secured the kind of research position she was looking for, she decided to take a break from physics to take on the role of homemaker. > The break was short-lived, as Feynman grew depressed from the drudgery of keeping a home and caring for two small children: In 1962, at the advice of a therapist, she went in search of employment Imagine how many great minds the world lost to societal rules about women staying home and not having careers. The number of mediocre men who went out into the world when they could have stayed at home while their wife worked is mind boggling and terrible to think about.
- app4soft 6y ago> Imagine how many great minds the world lost to societal rules about women staying home and not having careers. Everyone has right to choose one thing between career & family. Society should not control each person on this choice. World not lost nothing on the result choice because invention/research never exists.
- globular-toast 6y agoEh? If you actually read what you quoted you'd see that she tried to secure a position but failed and resigned to be a homemaker. There is no indication that it was anything to do with "societal rules". If men don't succeed in getting the position they want they too take on a less favourable role because they have to. You're really grasping at straws looking for things to be outraged by here.
- microtherion 6y agoHave you considered that "societal rules" may have been the predominant reason she tried and failed to find suitable employment?
- Caylio 6y agoOr perhaps she was not good enough and was not given any preferential treatment.
- lkesteloot 6y agoOh no! I _just_ finished reading James Gleick's _Genius_ this weekend, and I'm halfway through _No Ordinary Genius_ (both about Richard Feynman). The latter has many long quotes from Joan, and I was wondering just yesterday if she was still alive. She sounded pretty great. (And I highly recommend both books.)