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This quote says to me imposter syndrome can tap on your shoulder even if you’re as good as Feynman, so no need for anyone else to take it personally. And then
by WhitneyLand 4y ago
This quote says to me imposter syndrome can tap on your shoulder even if you’re as good as Feynman, so no need for anyone else to take it personally.
And then I thought to myself, “You know, what they think of you is so fantastic, it’s impossible to live up to it. You have no responsibility to live up to it!”… I realized that it was also true of all the other places, including my own university. I am what I am, and if they expected me to be good and they’re offering me some money for it, it’s their hard luck.
- zinclozenge 4y agoFeynman's imposter syndrome was actually justified, he couldn't really work at the same level of impact as most of the other Nobel laureates. His Nobel prize work was largely an extension of Dirac's previous work on path integrals, the bulk of the work that showed it to be equivalent to the traditional operator expansion method developed by Schwinger was done by Dyson, which is what really was the crucial piece. In fact, Feynman couldn't even solve the path integral for the hydrogen atom, that was done by Kleinert. In one of his books, he recounted an anecdote of Schwinger who, having made a mistake in a Bessel function, spent a few minutes to derive the solution from scratch to refresh his memory. It's basically for this reason that he "retired" from theoretical physics relatively shortly after his Nobel prize, he just couldn't keep up with the rest of the research being done.
- terofle 4y agoCould you please give a reference to this anectode? I could not find any on a quick google search. Thank you.