6 ms·

Richard Feynman – Session IV (1966)

65 points by lordylord 5y ago

bob667 5y ago
Feynman is a boss
smegsicle 5y ago
Is there an audio copy?
- pomian 5y ago
  yes. I have heard it. do not remember where. a series of interviews, fire side chat type r talks.
- Maursault 5y ago
  Surely there is audio of the full interview somewhere on the Internet? I almost believe I can rationalize it into existence.
  - richardfeynman 5y ago
    There is audio of this. Ralph Leighton has it.
    - rabryan 5y ago
      So why doesn’t he release it?
ooajim 5y ago
That's one long read. A good one too. I wish there was an audio copy too.
eskathos 5y ago
Not the same interview, but a talk also covering his time at Los Alamos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTRVlUT665U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTRVlUT665U
- beezle 5y ago
  While Feynman is famous for his computational work at Project Y, perhaps his most important contribution was the Bethe-Feynman equation for the efficiency of a nuclear weapon.
gattilorenz 5y ago
Feynman could talk about the color of beer coasters and it would be a fascinating read full of great anecdotes
- evanb 5y ago
  One of my collaborators recently wrote a paper about why beer coasters make bad frisbees. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08238 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08238
  - quinnjh 5y ago
    Yogurt lids really rip. Not that anyone asked
  - phgn 5y ago
    "He says, 'Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?'" "'Hah!' I say. 'There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it.' His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked." https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html
  - evanb 5y ago
    It seems this article went into the second-chance pool, which is great! It didn't get much discussion last time around but might spurn a lot of interesting threads. However, something I find a little upsetting: I commented the first time around (about 2 days ago). But currently the comments show that I commented first about 50 minutes ago. That's a little too much rewriting of history, if you ask me. What's funny is that when I came to leave this reply, on the "Add comment" page, it correctly says that my first comment was 2 days ago. So this information IS available. So the timestamp is rewritten? @dang, seems a little too much ret-conny... (It also makes me wonder what would happen if I visited the second-chance page before some of the other first-time comments were/are-going-to-be posted.)
    - leephillips 5y ago
ncmncm 5y ago
Warning, this is a book-length article. Set aside hours. It seems like much of the source material for what became "Surely...".
stanrivers 5y ago
Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery... https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard-feynman https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard... Copy / Paste: "But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital… And you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications. If you try to follow anything up, you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example, if you go, “Why did she slip on the ice?” Well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that, no problem. But you ask why is ice slippery? That’s kinda curious. Ice is extremely slippery. It's very interesting. You say, how does it work? You could either say, “I’m satisfied that you’ve answered me. Ice is slippery; that explains it,” or you could go on and say, “Why is ice slippery?” and then you're involved with something, because there aren't many things as slippery as ice... A solid that’s so slippery? Because it is, in the case of ice, when you stand on it (they say) momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit so you get a sort of instantaneous water surface on which you're slipping. Why on ice and not on other things? Because water expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it. It's capable of melting, but other substances get cracked when they're freezing, and when you push them they're satisfied to be solid. Why does water expand when it freezes and other substances don’t? I’m not answering your question, but I'm telling you how difficult the why question is. You have to know what it is that you're permitted to understand and allow to be understood and known, and what it is you're not. You'll notice, in this example, that the more I ask why, the deeper a thing is, the more interesting it gets. We could even go further and say, “Why did she fall down when she slipped?” It has to do with gravity, involves all the planets and everything else. Nevermind! It goes on and on."
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  And yet he totally shuts down the question of why positive and negative charges attract… which I’ve always been dying to understand. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-do-positive-and-negative-charges-attract.401974/ https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-do-positive-and-ne...
oolonthegreat 5y ago
golden. his bit about the curt richter's "hope" experiment (the one with drowning rats) is very interesting: > But then there was a talk by some guy who got up and told about experiments which were supposed to be the effect of stress on rats, on their desire to survive or something — on rats. What he had done was — I mean this is what he’d done — he described it in terms of a cylindrical glass tube, but it was a bottle. He took a jar and he put rats in the jar in water, and he screwed the lid on so that they couldn’t quite come up high enough when they were swimming to get a good breath, and they were drowning — hm? And he watched how long it took them to drown, under some kind of circumstance. Now, if that ain’t a kid fiddling around! There was nothing scientifically measured, in the sense that there was some sense to it, except that the rats got very nervous, you see, and they swam faster, or something. It was the most cruel, unnecessary, stupid thing. It was very much — except it wasn’t human beings — like the stupid kind of Nazi experiments in which they don’t exactly know what they’re doing; they’re just experimenting. Huh? It was just like a kid would experiment, God damn it, in drowning rats. It had no real scientific virtue of any kind.

65 points by lordylord 5y ago

bob667 5y ago

Feynman is a boss

smegsicle 5y ago

Is there an audio copy?

pomian 5y ago
yes. I have heard it. do not remember where. a series of interviews, fire side chat type r talks.
Maursault 5y ago
Surely there is audio of the full interview somewhere on the Internet? I almost believe I can rationalize it into existence.
- richardfeynman 5y ago
  There is audio of this. Ralph Leighton has it.
  - rabryan 5y ago
    So why doesn’t he release it?

ooajim 5y ago

That's one long read. A good one too. I wish there was an audio copy too.

eskathos 5y ago

Not the same interview, but a talk also covering his time at Los Alamos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTRVlUT665U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTRVlUT665U

beezle 5y ago
While Feynman is famous for his computational work at Project Y, perhaps his most important contribution was the Bethe-Feynman equation for the efficiency of a nuclear weapon.

gattilorenz 5y ago

Feynman could talk about the color of beer coasters and it would be a fascinating read full of great anecdotes

evanb 5y ago
One of my collaborators recently wrote a paper about why beer coasters make bad frisbees. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08238 https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08238
- quinnjh 5y ago
  Yogurt lids really rip. Not that anyone asked
- phgn 5y ago
  "He says, 'Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?'" "'Hah!' I say. 'There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it.' His reaction didn't discourage me; I had made up my mind I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked." https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/kilcup.1/262/feynman.html
- evanb 5y ago
  It seems this article went into the second-chance pool, which is great! It didn't get much discussion last time around but might spurn a lot of interesting threads. However, something I find a little upsetting: I commented the first time around (about 2 days ago). But currently the comments show that I commented first about 50 minutes ago. That's a little too much rewriting of history, if you ask me. What's funny is that when I came to leave this reply, on the "Add comment" page, it correctly says that my first comment was 2 days ago. So this information IS available. So the timestamp is rewritten? @dang, seems a little too much ret-conny... (It also makes me wonder what would happen if I visited the second-chance page before some of the other first-time comments were/are-going-to-be posted.)
  - leephillips 5y ago

ncmncm 5y ago

Warning, this is a book-length article. Set aside hours. It seems like much of the source material for what became "Surely...".

stanrivers 5y ago

Feynman's fascination with basically everything is always so fun. Here is another, where he is talking about trying to figure out why ice is slippery... https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard-feynman https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/takeaway-tuesday-richard... Copy / Paste: "But the problem, you see, when you ask why something happens, how does a person answer why something happens? For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people. It satisfies, but it wouldn't satisfy someone who came from another planet and who knew nothing about why when you break your hip do you go to the hospital… And you begin to get a very interesting understanding of the world and all its complications. If you try to follow anything up, you go deeper and deeper in various directions. For example, if you go, “Why did she slip on the ice?” Well, ice is slippery. Everybody knows that, no problem. But you ask why is ice slippery? That’s kinda curious. Ice is extremely slippery. It's very interesting. You say, how does it work? You could either say, “I’m satisfied that you’ve answered me. Ice is slippery; that explains it,” or you could go on and say, “Why is ice slippery?” and then you're involved with something, because there aren't many things as slippery as ice... A solid that’s so slippery? Because it is, in the case of ice, when you stand on it (they say) momentarily the pressure melts the ice a little bit so you get a sort of instantaneous water surface on which you're slipping. Why on ice and not on other things? Because water expands when it freezes, so the pressure tries to undo the expansion and melts it. It's capable of melting, but other substances get cracked when they're freezing, and when you push them they're satisfied to be solid. Why does water expand when it freezes and other substances don’t? I’m not answering your question, but I'm telling you how difficult the why question is. You have to know what it is that you're permitted to understand and allow to be understood and known, and what it is you're not. You'll notice, in this example, that the more I ask why, the deeper a thing is, the more interesting it gets. We could even go further and say, “Why did she fall down when she slipped?” It has to do with gravity, involves all the planets and everything else. Nevermind! It goes on and on."

dr_dshiv 5y ago
And yet he totally shuts down the question of why positive and negative charges attract… which I’ve always been dying to understand. https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-do-positive-and-negative-charges-attract.401974/ https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/why-do-positive-and-ne...

oolonthegreat 5y ago

golden. his bit about the curt richter's "hope" experiment (the one with drowning rats) is very interesting: > But then there was a talk by some guy who got up and told about experiments which were supposed to be the effect of stress on rats, on their desire to survive or something — on rats. What he had done was — I mean this is what he’d done — he described it in terms of a cylindrical glass tube, but it was a bottle. He took a jar and he put rats in the jar in water, and he screwed the lid on so that they couldn’t quite come up high enough when they were swimming to get a good breath, and they were drowning — hm? And he watched how long it took them to drown, under some kind of circumstance. Now, if that ain’t a kid fiddling around! There was nothing scientifically measured, in the sense that there was some sense to it, except that the rats got very nervous, you see, and they swam faster, or something. It was the most cruel, unnecessary, stupid thing. It was very much — except it wasn’t human beings — like the stupid kind of Nazi experiments in which they don’t exactly know what they’re doing; they’re just experimenting. Huh? It was just like a kid would experiment, God damn it, in drowning rats. It had no real scientific virtue of any kind.