@johncarlosbaez @acollierastro

So far I've watched half of her video, for lack of time.

Now you are giving me something else to read, which I'll do, too. When I have enough time.

@johncarlosbaez @acollierastro @feynmanlectures
> I hope Gottlieb and Collier can discuss this without using me as an intermediary.

Here in this golden friendly Utopia of the Internet? What could go wrong?

@johncarlosbaez Without wanting to fully endorse or invalidate anyone's statement (if I agree completely with anybody, I lose my academic license), I do want to say that pointing out that the red books had a third official coauthor hardly invalidates the general thesis that they were necessarily collaborative works that shouldn't feed a cult of personality for one man.

Regarding the book of exercises, all my experience with physics courses tells me that the homework problems were likely invented and worked over by many people, with the chain of attribution lost. Looking at Caltech's website,

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/ ,

the "Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics" are attributed to Caltech, and they are said to include many problems from an older book attributed to Bob Leighton and Robbie Vogt. My overall sense, from the Gleick book and other bits I've read, is that trying to make exercises to go with Feynman's lectures was a whole big job that required multiple people.

@johncarlosbaez @acollierastro @feynmanlectures I watched all three hours of Angela's video, and that letter doesn't do anything to address the important parts.

She outlined plenty of evidence that the "Surely you're joking" stories are false. The problems those books cause are independent of truth of the stories, and the letter says nothing about that.

@johncarlosbaez @acollierastro @feynmanlectures Perhaps I'm missing the main point that Angela Collier is making by getting confused by these revelations that are made where there is nothing to reveal because it is all out in the open. It is not true that "every book 'by 'Feynman'" was written by a Leighton, but even of the ones that were, it was very explicitly pointed out how the books came to be. My 1977 printing of 'The Lectures' has a lengthy preface where he uses the words like 'I' and 'my' when talking about his lectures, and 'we' when talking about transcribing and editing the books. That is followed by a lengthy forward by Leighton who talks about how it came together and all the people involved in the project. The 'Surely You're Joking' and 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?' are explicit in how they were transcribed by the younger Leighton from recordings of telling the stories. The latter, in fact, has a preface from Leighton that says 'My motivation is simple: ever since hearing my first Feynman stories, I have had the powerful desire to share them with others." If you want to know Feynman's involvement in those concoctions, you can just read the dust covers and prefaces, or better yet, listen to the audio stories yourself which have been also published. If telling the stories to someone who writes them down somehow discredits the authorship, I anxiously await her videos tearing down Stephen Hawking's books and papers too.

1/3

@johncarlosbaez @acollierastro @feynmanlectures
This quote from the letter would go nicely in the dictionary definition of “ad hominem”:

“Some people, who perhaps feel inferior, perhaps because they don't have much of anything positive to contribute, draw attention
to themselves by dissing famous people, and Feynman is a popular target in this respect.”

I doubt much productive discussion can follow from that.