Along these lines, one of the early popular science works is "Letters to a German Princess", which compiles Euler's letters on Natural Philosophy (which is mostly what we today call science and maths) which he was commissioned to write as part of her education. Many were keen to educate their daughters as well as royalty, so the book version sold well. It is, of course, very out of date in terms of the science.
Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.
“For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation.”
Interesting, he also talks about quantum computing (a first?): p. 191, "We now go on to consider how such a computer can also be built using the laws of quantum mechanics. We are going to write a Hamiltonian, for a system of interacting parts, which will behave in the same way as a large system in serving as a universal computer."
p. 196: "In general, in quantum mechanics, the outgoing state at time t is
eⁱᴴᵗ Ψᵢₙ where Ψᵢₙ is the input state, for a system with Hamiltonian H. To try to find, for a given special time t, the Hamiltonian which will produce M = eⁱᴴᵗ when M is such a product of non-commuting matrices, from some simple property of the matrices themselves, appears to be very difficult.
We realize, however, that at any particular time, if we expand eⁱᴴᵗ out (as 1 + iHt − H²t²⁄2 + …) we'll find the operator H operating an innumerable arbitrary number of times — once, twice, three times, and so forth — and the total state is generated by a superposition of these possibilities. This suggests that we can solve this problem of the composition of these A’s in the following way..."
Feynman is indeed often quoted among the first people to propose the idea of a quantum computer! This talk he gave in ‘81 is among the earliest discussion of why a quantum universe requires a quantum computer to be simulated [1]:
> Can a quantum system be probabilisticaUy simulated by a classical (probabilistic, I'd assume) universal computer? In other words, a computer which will give the same probabilities as the quantum system
does. If you take the computer to be the classical kind I've described so far, (not the quantum kind described in the last section) and there're no changes in any laws, and there's no hocus-pocus, the answer is certainly, No! This is called the hidden-variable problem: it is impossible to represent the results of quantum mechanics with a classical universal device.
Another unique lecture is a 1959 one [2] about the potential of nanotechnology (not even a real thing back then). He speaks of directly manipulating atoms and building angstrom-scale engines and microscope with a highly unusual perspective, extremely fascinating for anyone curious about these things and the historical perspective. Even for Feynman’s standards, this was a unique mix of topics and terminology. For context, the structure of DNA has been discovered about 5 years prior, and the first instruments capable of atomic imaging and manipulation are from at least the 80’s.
If you’re captivated by this last one as I was, I can also recommend Greg Bear’s novel “Blood Music”. It doesn’t explore the nanotechnology side much, but the main hook is biological cells as computers. Gets very crazy from there on.
The Feynman lectures are obviously brilliant but think the computation lectures are probably a better display of Feynman's brilliance. It's quite stunning how up to date they are.
Although that being said the rough outline of a field is usually worked out almost immediately after a consensus forms that it's "real" so to speak.
The theory of computation hasn't changed a whole lot since those times - and feynman explains it very well to a laymen audience (which is what makes it great, as it's not filled with jargon).
I feel like the section on primality testing with Fermat's test should at least make a shout out to Carmichael numbers and that for some inputs the probability you get a false positive result is 1.
I’ve been looking for a way to listen to the audio offline, but this website is very resistant to scraping. I’d appreciate if anyone knew of a free or paid place to download the audio lectures.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
A footnote for those of the millenial or more recent persuasion: we take the full “vastness of the heavens” as given, as we’ve seen it described pretty confidently all the way back to the science books of our childhood. But cosmology, and frankly the entire field of astrophysics, is strikingly young. The idea that nebulae are in fact whole independent collections of stars, and that the observable universe is large enough to accomodate all of that, is younger than quantum mechanics and relativity both, and only got acceptance after a huge fight. The name “Big Bang” was originally a pejorative used in a similar, later fight. And so on. When Feynman said this, the idea of nebulae as galaxies was younger (~40 years) than the key idea of quarks (confinement/asymptotic freedom) is today (~50 years), and I’m guessing the latter still counts as new and arcane in your mind.
I feel uncomfortable labelling nebulae as collection of stars. The more appropriate term is stellar nursery if you want to allude to their role in star formation.
They themselves are just clouds of gas and dust where protostars have begun to form.
Stellar clusters are what you would call a collection of stars.
Also on the note of cosmology and astrophysics being strikingly young fields, I think that's fair statement if we consider their modern definitions. Although their core ideas have already been discussed in a lot of ancient civilizations. It was a lot more philosophical and less rooted in science though (except for the observational astronomy, which remains perhaps one of the oldest scientific discipline).
I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles approach is so different than most physics textbooks.
Self study is the best study. Out of all the bloatedness of modern education, one thing that doesnt bother me is the high cost of textbooks. High quality books and a habit of studying yourself enables you to learn high skill disciplines on the cheap.
For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time while staying away from the internet and its attention hogging.
This is fantastic. I recently regained an interest in revisiting Feynman lectures but several audios I found on YouTube left me uneasy that they could be AI-generated. I aimed to ensure good sources before diving in again, but hadn’t yet had the opportunity to do so.
The videos are particularly interesting in how they include a transcript which is auto-highlighted and one can click around the text to move in the video. That’s a great mode of interaction I wish were more common. I have only found it in Apple’s WWDC videos.
It’s missing a way to link directly to a timestamp, and when switching videos from the tabs the URL doesn’t change, but those are minor inconveniences considering the rest of the website.
Also kudos on choice of using the structure of the atom image as the “loading” graphic.
Thank you to the authors for putting this together.
Let's be clear about this video; the "sham legacy" is the commercialization/exploitation of Feynman's legacy after he died. Feynman was not a charlatan. Collier doesn't claim he is. She talks about the very real contributions he made. Her criticism is largely about the way people scraped together any scrap of paper he had jotted down a note on and turned it into a thin book, "Feynman on XYZ topic".
But yes, he does catch criticism for his very real character flaws, his grandiosity, his philandering and inappropriate workplace behavior, and his physical abuse of his wife.
He was a complicated person. Much of the work discussing him is hagiography. This essay is even keeled but does not gloss over his flaws. Again, she discusses his very real contributions and legacy. It's a long essay; she makes time for the complexity of Feynman as a person.
If all you want to hear about Feynman is charming stories about Tuvan throat singing, you won't enjoy this essay. That's okay; it's not for everyone. There's an instinct to reject a critical work like this on it's face. I think that does a disservice, not only to Collier, but to us as students of history.
Collier is a working astrophysicist who spent months on this project. It is not a low effort hit piece. It's a critical but fair portrait from someone qualified to engage with the subject matter. I encourage everyone to withhold judgement until watching the entire essay. If you haven't seen it, you probably shouldn't make a knee jerk dismissal.
It should be knee-jerk dismissed because topic is the textbooks, not the man, and it's derailed discussion into a tangent about his personal shortcomings. Not exactly in the spirit of intellectual curiosity HN tries to foster.
Some people are (understandably) upset at the title of the video. I will summarize some of the main interesting beats in the video for those who don't want to watch this 3 hour masterpiece.
(1) The stories in "Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman" portray Feynman in a mean-spirited, sometimes sexist light.
(2) These books were not actually written by Mr. Feynman. They were actually written by Ralph Laden.
(3) Upon further reflection, almost all the stories are either made up or greatly exaggarated. Presumably, Feynman spent a lot of time telling and retelling these stories
(4) Also, Ralph Laden is Bob Laden's son. Supposedly, Bob Laden is also a famous physicist. But Ralph never really mentions him
His wife allegedly secretly reported him to the FBI as a potential spy, communist, security risk, fraud. It was an anonymous letter.
Given how different this wife's (second wife) description of Feynman compared to others is, that there are no record of complaints from first wife, the way her younger sister describes him, it could well be an earlier repeat of the now familiar Johnny Depp story, where it's not initially clear who the abusive person here is.
The marriage was certainly not a happy one and some people turn vindictive, turn to smearing characters. Especially if the person has narcissistic tendencies.
How this guy captures the imagination of the English speaking world is astonishing.
Sommerfeld
Landau
Schwinger
They mop the floor with Feynman but no one remembers them. Landau, meanwhile had the most comprehensive set of physics book, Sommerfeld the most accessible deep set of physics books.
Meanwhile "the Feynman Lectures" burry important details that will derail a train as soon as you leave the safe space of first order approximations.
Feynman's lectures are akin to the "everything is a mass on a spring" meme. Actually, nothing is, and the nobilities are everything. To his credit, though, Feynman never intended his lectures to be more than an intro survey class
It just wears thin after a while. Nobody studies Feynman to learn social skills or sexual ethics. If they did, these types of complaints would certainly be relevant... but they don't, and they aren't.
The guy invented the path integral in his PhD thesis. He invented Feynman diagrams and figured out how to do finite calculations in quantum electrodynamics. Unless you're a perfect human being, please, cut him just a tiny bit of slack.
I understand not watching a 3 hour video before leaving a comment, but this is a disrespectful reaction to a very well thought out video by a professional physicist giving a nuanced opinion about Feynman's legacy. She acknowledges many times in the video that Feynman was a great physicist who deserved his Nobel prize. The central topic of the video is dissecting his public image and the many books published under his name that he did not in fact write, including Surely You're Joking and indeed the Feynman Lectures, as well as criticizing misogynistic behaviors celebrated in those books that has left a negative impact on the culture of physics.
(And also, "cutting him a tiny bit of slack" is pretty lax language considering the behavior being criticized includes beating his wife.)
One gem if you're interested in semiconductors is the Feynman lecture "There's plenty of room at the bottom." He basically laid out the case for the modern nanotechnology age in 1959
My introduction to Feynman was more from other science communicators either quoting him or retelling some story about him and initially it formed a mental picture in my mind that he might be one of those personalities more famous culturally than for his actual scientific achievements. Like how in sports often the more popular players may not be the actual “best” one purely from the sporting skills pov.
But then I read more about him and yeah, he is indeed the real deal.
Feynam is my hero. I have Volumes I, II, and III of his red hardbound books. His biography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, is one of my favorites.
I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").
Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.
There is a book of exercises, which I've heard of but not looked at myself, titled "Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics". I don't know if that will help you but it might be worth a look.
Finally, asking Google something like "what is new in physics since feynman lectures", Gemini gave me a helpful summary in its "AI Overview" which you can also try out.
In one of the books he explained perfectly (to me) how to treat women at clubs in order to be respected and have attention from the gals. WORKS LIKE A CHARM despite being like 40,50 yr old boom now. ("You clearly must be joking ..." book)
His hints:
- NEVER EVER buy drinks for random gals
- Have a female companion(friend)
- Ignore them
"I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on."
There is a whole chapter about it, and it's not mysogonic.
He addressed the problem of females who simply eat and drink for free EXPLOITING stupid dudes as the default mode of partying. That's why he is hostile to them with
I highly recommend reading it. It's not worse than calling someone who exploits drunk women as 'dickhead'.
Lastly the word 'bitch' used here is an important part of the particular story where he used it against particular women who scammed him during the confrontation later.
Along these lines, one of the early popular science works is "Letters to a German Princess", which compiles Euler's letters on Natural Philosophy (which is mostly what we today call science and maths) which he was commissioned to write as part of her education. Many were keen to educate their daughters as well as royalty, so the book version sold well. It is, of course, very out of date in terms of the science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_a_German_Princess
Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.
Apropos of Feynman on computing, the story of his time working at Thinking Machines Corp https://longnow.org/ideas/richard-feynman-and-the-connection...
“For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation.”
Interesting, he also talks about quantum computing (a first?): p. 191, "We now go on to consider how such a computer can also be built using the laws of quantum mechanics. We are going to write a Hamiltonian, for a system of interacting parts, which will behave in the same way as a large system in serving as a universal computer."
p. 196: "In general, in quantum mechanics, the outgoing state at time t is eⁱᴴᵗ Ψᵢₙ where Ψᵢₙ is the input state, for a system with Hamiltonian H. To try to find, for a given special time t, the Hamiltonian which will produce M = eⁱᴴᵗ when M is such a product of non-commuting matrices, from some simple property of the matrices themselves, appears to be very difficult.
We realize, however, that at any particular time, if we expand eⁱᴴᵗ out (as 1 + iHt − H²t²⁄2 + …) we'll find the operator H operating an innumerable arbitrary number of times — once, twice, three times, and so forth — and the total state is generated by a superposition of these possibilities. This suggests that we can solve this problem of the composition of these A’s in the following way..."
Feynman is indeed often quoted among the first people to propose the idea of a quantum computer! This talk he gave in ‘81 is among the earliest discussion of why a quantum universe requires a quantum computer to be simulated [1]:
> Can a quantum system be probabilisticaUy simulated by a classical (probabilistic, I'd assume) universal computer? In other words, a computer which will give the same probabilities as the quantum system does. If you take the computer to be the classical kind I've described so far, (not the quantum kind described in the last section) and there're no changes in any laws, and there's no hocus-pocus, the answer is certainly, No! This is called the hidden-variable problem: it is impossible to represent the results of quantum mechanics with a classical universal device.
Another unique lecture is a 1959 one [2] about the potential of nanotechnology (not even a real thing back then). He speaks of directly manipulating atoms and building angstrom-scale engines and microscope with a highly unusual perspective, extremely fascinating for anyone curious about these things and the historical perspective. Even for Feynman’s standards, this was a unique mix of topics and terminology. For context, the structure of DNA has been discovered about 5 years prior, and the first instruments capable of atomic imaging and manipulation are from at least the 80’s.
If you’re captivated by this last one as I was, I can also recommend Greg Bear’s novel “Blood Music”. It doesn’t explore the nanotechnology side much, but the main hook is biological cells as computers. Gets very crazy from there on.
1. https://s2.smu.edu/~mitch/class/5395/papers/feynman-quantum-... 2. https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
6 replies →
I was just talking to someone about Feynman's lectures on computation the other day. I really really enjoyed it. That's all.
The Feynman lectures are obviously brilliant but think the computation lectures are probably a better display of Feynman's brilliance. It's quite stunning how up to date they are.
Although that being said the rough outline of a field is usually worked out almost immediately after a consensus forms that it's "real" so to speak.
The theory of computation hasn't changed a whole lot since those times - and feynman explains it very well to a laymen audience (which is what makes it great, as it's not filled with jargon).
I feel like the section on primality testing with Fermat's test should at least make a shout out to Carmichael numbers and that for some inputs the probability you get a false positive result is 1.
I’ve been looking for a way to listen to the audio offline, but this website is very resistant to scraping. I’d appreciate if anyone knew of a free or paid place to download the audio lectures.
I've thought of this quote a bunch and I came up with my own addon.
"Some people think that the magic of something wondrous is diminished when it's understood. I feel bad for those people." -- Shanemhansen
I pity the fool.
— Mr. T
"Magic is the inducement of awe." -- pstuart
A footnote for those of the millenial or more recent persuasion: we take the full “vastness of the heavens” as given, as we’ve seen it described pretty confidently all the way back to the science books of our childhood. But cosmology, and frankly the entire field of astrophysics, is strikingly young. The idea that nebulae are in fact whole independent collections of stars, and that the observable universe is large enough to accomodate all of that, is younger than quantum mechanics and relativity both, and only got acceptance after a huge fight. The name “Big Bang” was originally a pejorative used in a similar, later fight. And so on. When Feynman said this, the idea of nebulae as galaxies was younger (~40 years) than the key idea of quarks (confinement/asymptotic freedom) is today (~50 years), and I’m guessing the latter still counts as new and arcane in your mind.
I feel uncomfortable labelling nebulae as collection of stars. The more appropriate term is stellar nursery if you want to allude to their role in star formation.
They themselves are just clouds of gas and dust where protostars have begun to form.
Stellar clusters are what you would call a collection of stars.
Also on the note of cosmology and astrophysics being strikingly young fields, I think that's fair statement if we consider their modern definitions. Although their core ideas have already been discussed in a lot of ancient civilizations. It was a lot more philosophical and less rooted in science though (except for the observational astronomy, which remains perhaps one of the oldest scientific discipline).
2 replies →
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo
The man had a way with words.
The recent HN thread Why is the sky blue? is a good example of this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595
Unlike the commercial audio CDs of the lectures the recordings here have the chat before and after the lecture which is fun.
My favourite lecture is the standalone "The Principle of Least Action" at
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html
Audio: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html#Ch19-audi...
This one is my favorite too. I had the three volumes of hardcover copy.
> Later chapters do not depend on the material of this special lecture—which is intended to be for “entertainment”
We might say this is the most important chapter in the whole series.
I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles approach is so different than most physics textbooks.
Self study is the best study. Out of all the bloatedness of modern education, one thing that doesnt bother me is the high cost of textbooks. High quality books and a habit of studying yourself enables you to learn high skill disciplines on the cheap.
For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time while staying away from the internet and its attention hogging.
I got a kindle Scribe which can load PDF, HTML and text files via iPhone Kindle App and read offline.
Since most pre-1925 books are out of copyright and free on https://gutenberg.org, ACM is open access (https://dl.acm.org/) and we have open https://arxiv.org/, it is the golden age for readers seeking original content.
We don’t need bots to read for us. We can live in the mind of human writers.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain
This is fantastic. I recently regained an interest in revisiting Feynman lectures but several audios I found on YouTube left me uneasy that they could be AI-generated. I aimed to ensure good sources before diving in again, but hadn’t yet had the opportunity to do so.
The videos are particularly interesting in how they include a transcript which is auto-highlighted and one can click around the text to move in the video. That’s a great mode of interaction I wish were more common. I have only found it in Apple’s WWDC videos.
It’s missing a way to link directly to a timestamp, and when switching videos from the tabs the URL doesn’t change, but those are minor inconveniences considering the rest of the website.
Also kudos on choice of using the structure of the atom image as the “loading” graphic.
Thank you to the authors for putting this together.
"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
Let's be clear about this video; the "sham legacy" is the commercialization/exploitation of Feynman's legacy after he died. Feynman was not a charlatan. Collier doesn't claim he is. She talks about the very real contributions he made. Her criticism is largely about the way people scraped together any scrap of paper he had jotted down a note on and turned it into a thin book, "Feynman on XYZ topic".
But yes, he does catch criticism for his very real character flaws, his grandiosity, his philandering and inappropriate workplace behavior, and his physical abuse of his wife.
He was a complicated person. Much of the work discussing him is hagiography. This essay is even keeled but does not gloss over his flaws. Again, she discusses his very real contributions and legacy. It's a long essay; she makes time for the complexity of Feynman as a person.
If all you want to hear about Feynman is charming stories about Tuvan throat singing, you won't enjoy this essay. That's okay; it's not for everyone. There's an instinct to reject a critical work like this on it's face. I think that does a disservice, not only to Collier, but to us as students of history.
Collier is a working astrophysicist who spent months on this project. It is not a low effort hit piece. It's a critical but fair portrait from someone qualified to engage with the subject matter. I encourage everyone to withhold judgement until watching the entire essay. If you haven't seen it, you probably shouldn't make a knee jerk dismissal.
It should be knee-jerk dismissed because topic is the textbooks, not the man, and it's derailed discussion into a tangent about his personal shortcomings. Not exactly in the spirit of intellectual curiosity HN tries to foster.
Some people are (understandably) upset at the title of the video. I will summarize some of the main interesting beats in the video for those who don't want to watch this 3 hour masterpiece.
(1) The stories in "Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman" portray Feynman in a mean-spirited, sometimes sexist light. (2) These books were not actually written by Mr. Feynman. They were actually written by Ralph Laden. (3) Upon further reflection, almost all the stories are either made up or greatly exaggarated. Presumably, Feynman spent a lot of time telling and retelling these stories (4) Also, Ralph Laden is Bob Laden's son. Supposedly, Bob Laden is also a famous physicist. But Ralph never really mentions him
His wife allegedly secretly reported him to the FBI as a potential spy, communist, security risk, fraud. It was an anonymous letter.
Given how different this wife's (second wife) description of Feynman compared to others is, that there are no record of complaints from first wife, the way her younger sister describes him, it could well be an earlier repeat of the now familiar Johnny Depp story, where it's not initially clear who the abusive person here is.
The marriage was certainly not a happy one and some people turn vindictive, turn to smearing characters. Especially if the person has narcissistic tendencies.
[Who Smeared Feynman] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974999
I was ok with creepy uncle behavior, everyone has flaws, but the part about choking his wife broke my heart.
I can't help imagining his wife nagging him about taking out the trash just when he was about to solve quantum gravity.
I'm not saying it's ok... But it doesn't break my heart.
I guess it depends on how much pressure he applied.
1 reply →
So true.
How this guy captures the imagination of the English speaking world is astonishing.
Sommerfeld Landau Schwinger
They mop the floor with Feynman but no one remembers them. Landau, meanwhile had the most comprehensive set of physics book, Sommerfeld the most accessible deep set of physics books.
Meanwhile "the Feynman Lectures" burry important details that will derail a train as soon as you leave the safe space of first order approximations.
Feynman's lectures are akin to the "everything is a mass on a spring" meme. Actually, nothing is, and the nobilities are everything. To his credit, though, Feynman never intended his lectures to be more than an intro survey class
That was rather more interesting than I thought it would be.
Brave to link to that here.
It just wears thin after a while. Nobody studies Feynman to learn social skills or sexual ethics. If they did, these types of complaints would certainly be relevant... but they don't, and they aren't.
2 replies →
[flagged]
What's this better stuff?
3 replies →
yt is YouTube?
[flagged]
The guy invented the path integral in his PhD thesis. He invented Feynman diagrams and figured out how to do finite calculations in quantum electrodynamics. Unless you're a perfect human being, please, cut him just a tiny bit of slack.
I understand not watching a 3 hour video before leaving a comment, but this is a disrespectful reaction to a very well thought out video by a professional physicist giving a nuanced opinion about Feynman's legacy. She acknowledges many times in the video that Feynman was a great physicist who deserved his Nobel prize. The central topic of the video is dissecting his public image and the many books published under his name that he did not in fact write, including Surely You're Joking and indeed the Feynman Lectures, as well as criticizing misogynistic behaviors celebrated in those books that has left a negative impact on the culture of physics.
(And also, "cutting him a tiny bit of slack" is pretty lax language considering the behavior being criticized includes beating his wife.)
20 replies →
path integrals existed since the 19th century
One gem if you're interested in semiconductors is the Feynman lecture "There's plenty of room at the bottom." He basically laid out the case for the modern nanotechnology age in 1959
https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
My introduction to Feynman was more from other science communicators either quoting him or retelling some story about him and initially it formed a mental picture in my mind that he might be one of those personalities more famous culturally than for his actual scientific achievements. Like how in sports often the more popular players may not be the actual “best” one purely from the sporting skills pov.
But then I read more about him and yeah, he is indeed the real deal.
God Feynman was such an amazing teacher of complex topics. Never miss upvoting this guy.
His involvement in NASA and challenger investigations specifically are also legendary. Watch more Feynman. Totally worth the time investment.
On the topic of lecture notes, I can really recommend Scott Aaron's Quantum Information lecture notes: https://www.scottaaronson.com/qclec.pdf
My copy of volume 1 is signed!
Feynam is my hero. I have Volumes I, II, and III of his red hardbound books. His biography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, is one of my favorites.
I appreciate it, thanks.
Was funny the first time ...
I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").
Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.
Looks like they're here:
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/exercises.html
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flphandouts.html
There is a book of exercises, which I've heard of but not looked at myself, titled "Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics". I don't know if that will help you but it might be worth a look.
I'll try to find it; thanks!
I remember watching these for my JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) of India
Thank you I’ve been looking for this. His method of delivery is so clear I find it immensely relaxing.
What has changed in 60 years, I wonder? If you are teaching this material, what do you have to update and/or contextualize?
This is a good question and my initial thought would be Atomic Physics and Cosmology.
A book like Modern Atomic Physics by Vasant Natarajan (2015) would be a good place to look - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_fundamental_physic...
Finally, asking Google something like "what is new in physics since feynman lectures", Gemini gave me a helpful summary in its "AI Overview" which you can also try out.
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In one of the books he explained perfectly (to me) how to treat women at clubs in order to be respected and have attention from the gals. WORKS LIKE A CHARM despite being like 40,50 yr old boom now. ("You clearly must be joking ..." book)
His hints: - NEVER EVER buy drinks for random gals - Have a female companion(friend) - Ignore them
Saved me a ton of money haha
You mean this part?
"I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on."
Great advice! Not misogynistic at all!
There is a whole chapter about it, and it's not mysogonic. He addressed the problem of females who simply eat and drink for free EXPLOITING stupid dudes as the default mode of partying. That's why he is hostile to them with
I highly recommend reading it. It's not worse than calling someone who exploits drunk women as 'dickhead'.
Lastly the word 'bitch' used here is an important part of the particular story where he used it against particular women who scammed him during the confrontation later.
Read it as whole
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not lost on me that the top of hacker news came from 60 years ago.
we are entering the period of mourning
what was
won is n
ow lost
and the later days once feared are...
now here.
(the poet called bib)
Thanks for posting this.
There is a whole genre of youtube videos with AI generated Feynmann voice based on those lectures. They are of surprisingly high quality.
Do you have a link to a good one?
I presume the original videos of Feynman are lost, or never existed?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83EB1jGJwqE
I found this channel to be ok-ish.
Amazing!