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Comment by chrismatic

16 days ago

Not entirely without reason though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc

That video is such an extremely weak argument. Sure Feynman probably has more fame than he is merited. But he is still one of the most influential physicists. He just also happened to be entertaining and wrote some books. Personality and self-marketing makes a difference, welcome to society.

  • I'd recommend that you watch the entire video, because the point is that he did not even write any of those books.

    • Yah. He didn't write the Feynman Lectures on Physics. He just came up with the unique arguments in them and gave the lectures at Caltech; it fell to Leighton and Sands to do most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book.

      And his other books-- they're just his stories, trying to capture the characteristic style in which he talked, while editing it to be a cohesive written work.

      This criticism is maybe valid for QED-- I am not sure what fraction of that he was really involved in-- but not the rest of his body of work. Is this supposed to be bad?

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    • So someone took recordings of his stories and compiled them into a text....? What does that matter I have seen that entire video in the past, its unsubstantiated garbage that fails mild skepticism. Every point can be explained away trivially. They have an axe to grind against Fenyman / Men generally, and since this goes against the established narrative its therefore heralded as being correct and people blindly follow it.

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    • I would say read up a little so that you are in a position to make up your own mind. Also compare the video recordings and published book to figure out whose material it was.

      It's easy to throw muck at someone who is not around to defend.

      And you seem to be saying that it is a reasonable thing to do in this particular case.

I cannot take seriously someone pretending that Feynman was a sham

  • Feynman did physics and told stories.

    He was very serious about his physics and wrote that stuff down.

    Someone else wrote down his stories. His stories were probably often not entirely accurate, and whomever wrote down his stories also probably had an agenda. So books "by feynman" should be treated with some caution since they're written not by feynman.

    His physics and science are obviously not "a sham". It is in fact possible for someone to be great and awful at the same time.

  • There is just a big market for "X great person of the past was actually awful" and "what you learned in school is actually a conspiracy". That these things get spread like wildfire whenever they are brought up, because some people thinks it make them seem smarter I assume. They also drop all introspection or skepticism about it. I would put "Feynman is actually awful" in the same bucket as the "Mercator project is a racist conspiracy" (No one owns a globe apparently) or the multitude of "actually x woman is responsible for scientific advancement, not the man" stories that get spread around. They all fail at any real analysis.