If you love Richard Feynman you've got to watch this video...

... where Angela Collier will ruthlessly dissect the mythology he built around himself. You probably won't agree with everything she says, and you may hate some of it, but it will still be thought-provoking.

I didn't know about what she calls "Feynman bros": lazy male students who read Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman! and try to adopt the flashy womanizing persona he depicts there, instead of working hard on physics. I can easily believe they exist. So if you know a youngster who likes physics, don't give them that book. Instead do what my uncle did: give them The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

I didn't know these books and indeed every book 'by Feynman' was actually written by his Caltech colleague Robert Leighton or his son Ralph Leighton based on audiotapes of lectures or conversations. I still don't know how much of a role Feynman had in crafting these concoctions.

I *did* know that he once flew into a rage and tried to choke his second wife.

I did not know he was good with children, eagerly answering letters from them, etc. It's nice that Collier points out this good side.

I *did* notice, from his anecdotes, that he put a huge amount of work into trying to seem like a manly man rather than a nerd.

I didn't fully notice that almost none of his anecdotes feature the famous physicists he worked with at the Manhattan Project. Collier points out that this leaves him free to make things up.

I think she overlooks how he eagerly *points out* that he used tricks to seem smart. He explains the tricks to show they're not so hard.

I could go on....

(1/2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc

@johncarlosbaez I recall reading that Feynman thought of himself as not as brilliant as some other physicists, but able to contribute because he thought differently.

@danpmoore @johncarlosbaez
Feynman did in fact strike me as being outright proud of his supposedly low-ish IQ score of 120, and otherwise supposedly not being brilliant, yet nonetheless competing well with brilliant people like Schwinger and Tomonaga -- like he had the attitude that "look, they got the Nobel Prize by being brilliant enough to conquer super complex things, but I got it by figuring out how to simplify things to the point where I could figure them out".

Even if he was literally correct about all that (which is hard to judge), I would still call that a different form of brilliance.

@dougmerritt @danpmoore - Indeed, one of the big things I took away from Feynman's anecdotes is his insistent message that you don't need to be a "genius" to figure things out - it's not a matter of divine inspiration or magic.

However, I decided long ago that he was overplaying this, and downplaying the technical knowlege and huge amount of thought required to be a good physicist. I think he did that because he wanted to come across as an everyman, a likeable kid from Brooklyn. I think he put a huge amount of energy into playing this role.

@johncarlosbaez @danpmoore
I think you are exactly on target with that; that seems to capture Feynman quite well, judging by the books.

As a footnote, anyone even a little above average understands the impulse to try to "blend in with the crowd", whether one goes with it or not.

You, for instance, are never so immodest as to mention your own self-assessment. ;)

Not trying to give you a hard time; you're a great communicator and educator. Some things work with people, some things don't -- and all of our judgements on such things vary considerably. There is no perfect path.

@dougmerritt - I decided pretty early on that trying to fit in was pointless. In college and grad school I was often depressed about this and considered suicide, but that also seemed pointless. Then things took a turn for the better in various ways, like getting into a good relationship. And the great thing about being a professor is that nobody *expects* professors to act normal - in fact, they want you to be a bit eccentric. So that was a great niche for me.

Unfortunately university administrators are taking over. They underestimate how eccentric professors actually are. They want to make the university into a business and boss the professors around. So I quit.

(Of course I was very lucky to have enough money to simply quit! Otherwise I would have either stuck it out, or hopped to somewhere else, like the Topos Institute, which is less under the thumb of administrators. Again, I'm very lucky to have that option. But now that I'm wanting to leave the US, I'm returning to work half-time at a traditional university in Scotland.)

@johncarlosbaez @dougmerritt I'm glad to see we have certain things in common. The one thing we don't have in common but wish that we did is that I was blessed with great teachers and mentors in science, chemistry, physics, engineering, software, and plagued with terrible teachers of mathematics. It took me years and years of self-study to master mathematics I could have known by 18 years of age, had I had good teachers.

I suspect I know what was wrong. For me to learn something quickly and easily, I have to see a use for the thing I'm learning. I have a mental block against learning things for which I see no practical use. I needed math teachers that showed WHY I need to learn this method or algorithm. But they didn't do that. "Just learn it. Memorize it." This may work for some but not for me.

@shuttersparks - I never needed a practical reason to understand something as long as it made the world make more sense. Math has always done that for me: it seems more reasonable than anything else in this weird world of ours, so I've always been attracted to it.

I've rarely been able to learn an algorithm until I understood why it worked. Luckily I was never forced to. I guess they were explained to me when I was a kid in school... though frankly, I don't even remember!

Actually here's an algorithm I've memorized: the one where you use your knuckles to figure out which months have 31 days and which have fewer. I still use this, because I can't remember offhand how many days are in each month (except February), and it seems less work to remember this algorithm. My wife prefers the poem, but too many months end in "ember".

@dougmerritt

@johncarlosbaez @dougmerritt Fascinating. I've actually long wondered why I'm not a math whiz. I'm a whiz at just about everything else, everything I've undertaken, but not math, or "higher math" anyway. As an engineer I use math all the time, but my ability hit a wall at linear algebra.

It just seems odd to me that I have any problem with math at all. But I do. Of course at my age it doesn't matter anymore. Hahaha.

@shuttersparks @dougmerritt - My theory (based on nothing except knowing many people who math, or give up on it) is that at some point you met one or more obstacles that made you turn away from math rather than "lean in".

I've met lots of topics in math that absolutely stump me. For some, I just turn away - and those are topics I've never yet understood, like spectral sequences. For others, I become a mixture of excited, angry, and fascinated - and the adrenaline powers me to keep working away until I finally figure things out. I think about them in the middle of the night, and so on. When I finally crack them, this gives me a thrill. Memories of those thrills make me more inclined to get over the next hill.

In short, I don't think being a math whiz is just about math being easier for some than others. It's also about what people do when it gets tough.

@johncarlosbaez @shuttersparks @dougmerritt

This opinion gels with my experience and observations in math and science. Many of the greatest folks become great by sticking at a problem longer than others, figuring out the details and insights through sheer force of will. One might say they are obsessive. Einstein himself often played downed his mathematical abilities, and the historical record seems to agree with his assertion that his greatest contributions came from an obsessive drive to understand nature.

@johncarlosbaez @shuttersparks @dougmerritt

I might also add that these are the same folks who understand the subject matter best and so are best able to explain it to others, as John has become so proficient at doing!

@TonyVladusich @johncarlosbaez @shuttersparks
You know, the surprising thing is that John was proficient at it right off the bat -- when he started communicating on Usenet anyway, I don't know about when he was, say, 10. :)

@TonyVladusich @johncarlosbaez @shuttersparks
Come to think of it, his proficiency at simplifying complexity to explain may have certain similarities to Feynman's proclivities discussed above.

@dougmerritt wrote: "Come to think of it, his proficiency at simplifying complexity to explain may have certain similarities to Feynman's proclivities discussed above."

I do copy tricks from Feynman. Like: eliminating unnecessary distracting verbiage. Most people are pretty bad at that, because 1) they don't make up their mind what they're trying to say, 2) they don't spend time deliberately subtracting words and sentences from what they write.

@TonyVladusich @shuttersparks