csbchristopher
Angela CollierI made a video.
Stefan@acollierastro on your way to a full 24 hour video!
Clair (KD3BCC)@acollierastro let me get the popcorn.
🍿 🧈 ?
David Hoeffer@acollierastro watching this made me realize that a good part of why I dropped out of physics was that I convinced myself that you need to just intuitively understand physics without much work, or you don't belong there. So I guess the description of the Feynman bro who eventually disappears is spot on (in case anyone's doubting)
Quaap@acollierastro this video was a fuckin roller coaster
Refurio AnachroFeynman a fraud? An insecure guy making up stories? Are the books about him all lies? Watch Angela Colliers video linked upthread!
Thank you, @acollierastro, watching you debunk thr Feynman legends was such fun!
There's record of Leonard Susskind scratching at the legend as well. He says he was good friends with him, and at one occasion (I can't remember the link, it's a celeb lecture on Youtube) he hinted at Feynman having a severe alcohol addiction. He obviously didn't want to put him in too much of a bad light, but he kept putting his tongue in his cheek remembering him.
Feral ThoughtsI suppose Walter Isaacson is the monogamous Ralph Leighton's promiscuous twin, the fox to Leighton's hedgehog 😉
Kidding apart, excellent survey of the commercial setup minting Feynman's name and fame.
Godfather-length videos are becoming your signature, you should keep it up 👍
Some points about Feynman that had occurred to me earlier (and are not covered in your video):
1. Feynman was one of the workers involved in the construction of the atomic bomb in the early 1940s, yet there is hardly any comment in the "autobiographies" on the overwhelming threat of a nuclear winter and related issues.
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2. Many of Feynman's colleagues at Los Alamos were persecuted in the 1950s during the McCarthy witch-hunt, most prominently Robert Oppenheimer, Feynman's Los Alamos boss (and mentor?). However, not only as a young faculty member in his 30s, but even as a 67 year old legendary Nobel prize winning physicist, Feynman neither condemned nor uttered any other comment on the McCarthy witch-hunt that had targeted some of his closest ex-colleagues.
That's elite cowardice!
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3. Feynman's cowardice also extends to not taking any position on the philosophical dilemmas around quantum physics, issues which the previous generation of Niels Bohr and Einstein were unafraid to tackle.
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4. Feynman's comments on philosophy come across as stupid, and seem like an effort to create an image of the "practical American"; perhaps he was trying to hide his own deeply theoretical inclinations, and to preempt people from thinking of him as a nerd.
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5. Feynman's derision of psychiatry is equally pointless.