4 ms·

Was he 10x physicist?

by dvh 4y ago

going_ham 4y ago
More like a generalist who also happened to be one of the greatest. You can read his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" It adds some characteristic to his flamboyant personality.
- fluidcruft 4y ago
  "Flamboyant" https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-feynman-mcneill https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...
  - LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    That article is overblown and written like it's trying to take offense. The first thing they list is Feynman "calling women bitches" in the autobiography, but they leave out the context that it's a thought experiment his friend is proposing to him to try to snap him out of being a loser. He psychs himself up to see bar girls as users and bitches and refuses to follow their script which removes him from the patsy role and lets him reexamine the dynamic. He then says that while this works he didn't use those techniques because he found them distasteful and doesn't refer to women in a derogatory way in the rest of his memoirs. Apparently his most serious offense was not admitting he was a professor when dating. As long as he wasn't dating students in his faculty I don't see why that's inappropriate at all. They quote his ex-wife saying he flew into violent rages when interrupted and treat it as if he was violent to her, where the report makes it sound like he threw things around. Flawed, sure. Enough to warrant having some snarky cancel-culture style takedown written about him and dropped in a passive-aggressive way during every semi-related conversation? Doubtful. There's no evidence, or even coherent suggestion, that he hurt people let alone enjoyed doing so.
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      I can't go into detail without losing at least 20 bits worth of anonymity, but fwiw this internet rando claims to have personal reasons to agree with the last para.
    - baandang 4y ago
      IMO you have to forgive the young and their ignorance. If you are too young to have known and talked to someone from the World War 2 generation, you can't know that literally every man in the United States would be cancelled from that generation if judged on modern standards. Most of the women would be cancelled too though. The generation before that? Forget sleeping with students, they were perfectly fine with children working long hours in dangerous factories and coal mines. A person with a brain would almost conclude that society changes and progresses over time. Who would have thought?
- baandang 4y ago
  I am a huge Gell-Mann fan as well as Feynman and it is a shame we don't have video of those two in conversation. Gell-Mann has said that Feynman didn't think there was enough evidence for washing your hands after taking a piss. That level of skepticism is so endearing to me. I think of myself as highly skeptical but that is another level.
p1esk 4y ago
there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber https://www.comesaunter.com/2008/07/mark-kac-on-the-two-kinds-of-geniuses.html https://www.comesaunter.com/2008/07/mark-kac-on-the-two-kind...
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  From OP's link: >What Penrose and many other physicists didn't realize was the reason that accounted for Feynman's quickness on many matters in physics. Feynman thought about some of these areas in great depth and for long periods of time. A topic like quantum gravity would be one that Feynman had spent countless hours thinking about. It wasn't all off the cuff. This is also beautifully laid out across many examples in Feynman's book. His incredible reasoning abilities were not magic, they would merely appear so to the uninitiated. Like all magic tricks, there was a very reasonable, down to earth explanation behind them. In his case, he was simply a physicist that lived and breathed for his job and for any question you could ask him, there was a good chance that he already spent quite some time pondering it in private.
  - p1esk 4y ago
    I’m pretty sure the way people like Feynman “ponder about” things is very different from how normal people (like an average physicist) ponder about things. Probably similar to how we could compare me playing tennis and Roger Federer playing tennis. No matter how much I practice I will not approach that level.

Was he 10x physicist?

by dvh 4y ago

Was he 10x physicist?

More like a generalist who also happened to be one of the greatest. You can read his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" It adds some characteristic to his flamboyant personality.

fluidcruft 4y ago
"Flamboyant" https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-feynman-mcneill https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...
- LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
  That article is overblown and written like it's trying to take offense. The first thing they list is Feynman "calling women bitches" in the autobiography, but they leave out the context that it's a thought experiment his friend is proposing to him to try to snap him out of being a loser. He psychs himself up to see bar girls as users and bitches and refuses to follow their script which removes him from the patsy role and lets him reexamine the dynamic. He then says that while this works he didn't use those techniques because he found them distasteful and doesn't refer to women in a derogatory way in the rest of his memoirs. Apparently his most serious offense was not admitting he was a professor when dating. As long as he wasn't dating students in his faculty I don't see why that's inappropriate at all. They quote his ex-wife saying he flew into violent rages when interrupted and treat it as if he was violent to her, where the report makes it sound like he threw things around. Flawed, sure. Enough to warrant having some snarky cancel-culture style takedown written about him and dropped in a passive-aggressive way during every semi-related conversation? Doubtful. There's no evidence, or even coherent suggestion, that he hurt people let alone enjoyed doing so.
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    I can't go into detail without losing at least 20 bits worth of anonymity, but fwiw this internet rando claims to have personal reasons to agree with the last para.
  - baandang 4y ago
    IMO you have to forgive the young and their ignorance. If you are too young to have known and talked to someone from the World War 2 generation, you can't know that literally every man in the United States would be cancelled from that generation if judged on modern standards. Most of the women would be cancelled too though. The generation before that? Forget sleeping with students, they were perfectly fine with children working long hours in dangerous factories and coal mines. A person with a brain would almost conclude that society changes and progresses over time. Who would have thought?
baandang 4y ago
I am a huge Gell-Mann fan as well as Feynman and it is a shame we don't have video of those two in conversation. Gell-Mann has said that Feynman didn't think there was enough evidence for washing your hands after taking a piss. That level of skepticism is so endearing to me. I think of myself as highly skeptical but that is another level.

p1esk 4y ago

there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. They seldom, if ever, have students because they cannot be emulated and it must be terribly frustrating for a brilliant young mind to cope with the mysterious ways in which the magician’s mind works. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber https://www.comesaunter.com/2008/07/mark-kac-on-the-two-kinds-of-geniuses.html https://www.comesaunter.com/2008/07/mark-kac-on-the-two-kind...

sigmoid10 4y ago
From OP's link: >What Penrose and many other physicists didn't realize was the reason that accounted for Feynman's quickness on many matters in physics. Feynman thought about some of these areas in great depth and for long periods of time. A topic like quantum gravity would be one that Feynman had spent countless hours thinking about. It wasn't all off the cuff. This is also beautifully laid out across many examples in Feynman's book. His incredible reasoning abilities were not magic, they would merely appear so to the uninitiated. Like all magic tricks, there was a very reasonable, down to earth explanation behind them. In his case, he was simply a physicist that lived and breathed for his job and for any question you could ask him, there was a good chance that he already spent quite some time pondering it in private.
- p1esk 4y ago
  I’m pretty sure the way people like Feynman “ponder about” things is very different from how normal people (like an average physicist) ponder about things. Probably similar to how we could compare me playing tennis and Roger Federer playing tennis. No matter how much I practice I will not approach that level.