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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
If you're into atomic physics and getting a feel for the intricate structure of the basic processes, the best find I had recently is this MIT course by Wolfgang Ketterle. The first lecture is an informal overview, and he gives vivid and detailed descriptions of the phenomena they can create and control now, like why we see different kinds of thing happening at very low temperatures: the atoms are moving past each other so slowly that it gives their wavefunctions time to overlap and interact, using intersecting lasers to create arrays of dimples in the electromagnetic field to draw in and hold single atoms, this kind of thing. It gives a more tangible insight into the quantum aspects of matter that can otherwise seem inscrutable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agu68RGaoWM&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...
He also got the Nobel prize in the 90s for making a Bose-Einstein condensate iirc.
The quote is not suggesting a quantum computer can’t be simulated classically, it can in fact, just slowly, by keeping track of the quantum state where n qubits is 2^n complex amplitudes.
It relates more to the Bell results, that there doesn’t exist a hidden variable system that’s equivalent to QM.
IBM (atoms) [1989]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_%28atoms%29
Are there Feynmans today making predictions which we scoff at.
“There’s plenty of space at the bottom” only really took off in popularity decades later. Feynman’s accomplishments are undeniable, Nobel prize and all, but his celebrity status is given by other aspects of his personality. No Feynman equivalent I can think of is alive today. Perhaps Geoffrey Hinton and his views on the risk of AGI? He’s far from the only one of course.
indeed there are.
Said by the man himself no less
Talk about a cliffhanger
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.
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?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).
Sorry, yes, there’s a terminological disconnect here: M31, say, is the “Andromeda Galaxy” to us, but the “Andromeda Nebula” to Hubble’s contemporaries circa 1920. The recognition that at least some of the cloudy (nebulous, literally) stuff in the sky is galaxies (and that the universe fits more than one) was the very point of the fight I mentioned. The world before it was thought to be drastically smaller in a way that I find difficult to think about.
That's right. Historically, nebula was anything that looked cloudy, so a lot of astrophysical objects that we now understand are distinct, were simply labelled as nebulous. M31, as you said, being a great example.
Modern astrophysics still carries the baggage of obsolete terminology to this day, from names of objects to names of units.
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=46946401
Once you start going down the rabbit hole you start asking questions like "does the photon oscillate?", "what exactly is resonant frequency?", "how different is the electron cloud around a molecule from that around its constituent atoms?", "how does a photon passing by/through a molecule cause its electron cloud to oscillate?" etc. The act of clarifying each to oneself in however simple a form is the insight we all crave. Good teachers like Feynman do a great job of it which is why their books are so highly valued.
PS: People might find the recent free book Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites (2025) good for an initial understanding of atomic physics - 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.
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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.
Are technical/scientific books from pre-1925 particularly useful for self-learning today? I'd imagine for most disciplines, the knowledge has progressed and possibly changed course since then and it may be more outdated than not.
It might depend on the topic. Classical mechanics? I'm not sure that there is any fundamentally new knowledge since 1925 in that field. What's different is that people have 100 more years of figuring out how to explain it well.
A previous comment of mine is relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41567665
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" - Mark Twain
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
"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 the submission 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.
Ad hominem is indeed the hallmark of a small mind.
> Not exactly in the spirit of intellectual curiosity HN tries to foster.
I could not disagree more. If you don't see how a comprehensive, warts and all look at the man's life and legacy doesn't add context and foster curiosity, I'm not even sure what to tell you.
It didn't derail the conversation, it expanded it. There's still plenty of discussion about the lectures. This isn't even particularly close to the top of the thread.
What's opposed to curious discussion is knee jerk reactions and middlebrow dismissals.
Well said !
These sort of people are what is pejoratively called "attention whores" with nothing worthwhile to contribute on the topic under discussion. Hence they always come up with provocative phrases/statements simply to make themselves feel relevant.
Downvote and Flag these sorts of comments into oblivion; don't engage with them.
This is offensive and uncalled for. If the admins see your comment, they will tell you that comments like this get you banned. I don't agree with ThrowawayR2 but they were respectful; I doubt they appreciate their views being lumped in with your insulting, inappropriate comment. You've done a disservice to both of us.
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
Let me begin by saying that I am a friend of Ralph Leighton, whom I have known for 27 years. I am also a friend of Feynman's children, and several of Feynman's friends and colleagues. Now I will tell you this: Collier is a liar. The books "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think" were made the same way that The Feynman Lectures on Physics was made: Feynman was recorded, and the recordings were transcribed and (lightly) edited for readability. It is true for ALL of Feynman's books (also Stephen Hawking's many books, and those of some other authors) that he did not put pen to paper himself, but what is written came from him, and are not the inventions of Ralph Leighton, nor does Leighton claim authorship to them. It is another lie of Collier that the stories in Feynman's autobiographical books are "either made up or greatly exaggerated," for which Collier provides no evidence whatsoever, and for which there are witnesses who claim the contrary - this is something Collier just "made up", because, apparently her goal in making several pejorative videos about Feynman is to defame him, for her own personal reasons. Yes it is true that Ralph Leighton is Robert Leighton's son, and Robert Leighton, who is one of Feynman's coauthors in The Feynman Lectures on Physics, was a great physicist, best known for establishing the field of microwave astronomy. But why would Ralph mention his father in Feynman's autobiographical books, when Robert Leighton is not a character in any of the stories Feynman tells in those books? What kind of criticism is that to make of Ralph? This is another example of how Collier is merely trying to smear the names of Feynman and the people associated with him. Note that Collier also says in her videos that The Feynman Lectures on Physics (the subject of this discussion) is "not worth reading," which puts her at odds with almost everyone who reads it - it is, in fact, one of the most (if not THE most) popular physics books ever written, and many great physicists sing its praises. Once again, this is Collier just dissing Feynman and his works. Collier is a Feynman-hating liar who fully deserves to be ignored.
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
> Sommerfeld Landau Schwinger
I am the OP who posted this with an idea of eliciting other notable works on Physics and comparing them to Feynman Lectures. I do not want this to be derailed into talking about the man.
While i know of Landau & Lifshitz, i have not read Arnold Sommerfeld's nor Julian Schwinger's works.
I sincerely suggest that you post a top-level comment in this thread with your takes on Feynman vs. Other authors works that you mention. This would be of great help to everybody interested in Physics and Science.
I think Feynman's popularity lie with his deep understanding of phenomena and ability to explain them to others - "If you can't explain it to a six-year old, you don't understand it yourself"
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.
People also don’t think he’s one of the greatest physicists ever.
As he said, he was just an ordinary person who worked very hard.
Everyone thinks they are ordinary. If you have 160 IQ that just feels ordinary. You can only really measure ordinary in terms of achievement.
The 100 IQ person that works that hard doesn't invent that much physics. They might get rich, change the world etc.
Well, the Nobel committee certainly seemed to disagree with you.
I guess you didn’t watch the video so you don’t understand the point I’m trying to address.
At any rate, this garbage doesn’t belong on HN.
Can you elaborate on that point? I didn't downvote you, but I'm also not going to watch a 3-hour #metoo video about a guy from my grandfather's era in order to understand what you mean.
What's next... is she going to tell me that Newton was a real asshole? Noooooo, say it isn't so.
It’s discussed in the first few minutes. That’s basically all I watched. One of the first points she tries to make is that people claim that Feynman is one of the top physicists of all time, comparable to Einstein and Newton. She tries to set us straight.
Anyway, I’m a big Feynman fan. My Discord handle is feynman1918.
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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://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-f...
Submitted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974999
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.)
If you listen to the taped Feynman lectures, yes Feynman did write them. The published versions were edited from transcripts.
Be forewarned. There's a new YouTube channel with an AI Feynman delivering slop.
This was really frustrating me. YT started recommending this channel and I could recognize the voice as an AI impersonation but had no way to know if it was at least reading something really written by Feynman. Eventually I concluded it wasn't, but there wasn't clear criteria under which I could report the channel. I'm not sure it's even against YT's TOS.
I saw this and what makes this particularly pernicious that you assume it was a fan applying ai voice to his authentic words, but you don't know.
There is also an ai slop channel featuring Leonard Susskind.
misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go.
From the about the authors in the OP's link "Feynman was a remarkably effective educator. Of all his numerous awards, he was especially proud of the Oersted Medal for Teaching, which he won in 1972.". He probably didn't do a lot of the stuff he popularised, but that was what he did, it is a skill taking abstract stuff and making it coherent. I know when I did physics (in the 90's) many swore by his books, particularly for quantum, it was a bit of a secret we'd have these incomprehensible books on quantum, and someone would say - have you seen "The Feynman lectures", they are good, I wish we had the videos available at the time.
> misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture.
Moral relativism is a thing, but I think a more useful way to think of it rather than just saying "misogyny was a thing back then, should we care he was a misogynist then?" is to ask "if he were to have lived and worked in the 2000s, would he associate with Epstein?" And to be honest… Feynman does strike me as the kind of person to have the intellect to attract Epstein's attention and also the, for lack of a better term, party attitude to go to a couple of Epstein's parties that would result in him having awkward press releases trying to explain that he just had no possible idea that Epstein was doing anything sexual with children and conveniently forgetting all the times he was on the private island for some party or another...
That's the real strong vibe I get from Surely You're Joking. He's the kind of person who wants to be seen as someone who gets up to wacky hijinks, to be seen as "cool," and he specifically interprets "cool" in a way that's misogynistic even at a time (when he was dictating the stories that led to Surely You're Joking) when misogyny was starting to become a professional hindrance.
(And one of the things that really worries me about Surely You're Joking is that it's often recommended as a sort of "look at the wacky hijinks you can get up to as a physicist," so recommending the book is a valorization of his wacky hijinks and... well, that's ultimately what Angela's video is about, that's a thing we need to stop doing.)
> would he associate with Epstein?
This is from Lawrence Krauss[0]'s email to Epstein[1]:
> ps. I have decided that Feynman would have done what I did... and I am therefore content.. no matter what... :)
> On Apr 6, 2011, at 3:56 PM, Jeffrey Epstein wrote:
> what evidence? no real sex.. where is she getting her so called facts
Krauss's letter is obviously horrible in its implications. What's interesting to me is his interpretation of what Feynman would have done. Is it his delusional justification of what he'd done with Epstein, or is it based on a certain reputation of Feynman in the science community?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss [1] https://www.epstein.media/files/house_oversight_030915/
> That's the real strong vibe I get from Surely You're Joking. He's the kind of person who wants to be seen as someone who gets up to wacky hijinks, to be seen as "cool," and he specifically interprets "cool" in a way that's misogynistic even at a time (when he was dictating the stories that led to Surely You're Joking) when misogyny was starting to become a professional hindrance.
In my experience, everyone who says this is talking about exactly one chapter in Surely You're Joking, but they don't appear to actually have paid close attention to the story. It's a story that Feynman recounts about trying to pick up girls when he was younger. He was advised by an older, "cooler" man to be mean. Feynman tries it and it works, but he feels bad about it and says that he never did it again. People calling Feynman a misogynist for this story seem to have just skipped the end of the chapter.
It's been decades since I read Surely You're Joking, and I've completely forgotten about that chapter. It plays no part in my conscious recollection of the book.
The episode that really stuck in my mind was the episode about his competition with the abacus-user, who was better at math, which essentially ends with him giving up trying to explain how he could mental math a cube root faster, because the abacus-user was just someone who couldn't understand a math explanation.
I remembered enjoying the book, so having not read it in a long time, I tried sharing Surely You're Joking with my kids at bedtime.
That chapter wasn’t the only thing I ended up skipping or heavily editing.
* Picking a room at Los Alamos with a window facing the women’s housing, but being disappointed that a tree or something blocked his view. (Wasn’t he also married at this point?)
* Starting a new Uni faculty position and hanging out at student dances, dismayed that girls would stop chatting & dancing with him when they learned he was a prof and not a fellow student.
* Hanging out at strip clubs to practice his drawing skills.
* Considering a textbook sales rep’s offer to help him find “trouble” in Vegas.
So maybe that one chapter turns around some at the end, but it’s not the only cringe-worthy moment in the book, and I can see why some people may have an overall negative opinion.
If I were going to do this with my kids now that they are teens, I wouldn’t filter as much and use the more questionable events as points of discussion.
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> misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go.
The video actually addresses this very point in the first few minutes:
> the second component of the Feynman lifestyle that the Feynman bro has to follow, you know as told in this book, is that women are inherently inferior to you and if you want to be the smartest big boy physicist in the room you need to make sure they know that I think people are sometimes shocked to hear this like that that exists in this book especially because as I said if you were a precocious teenager interested in physics people shoved this book at you they just put it into your hands like oh you want to be a physicist here's the coolest physicist ever
> I feel like it's at this point in the video when like Mr. Cultural Relativism is going to show up in the comments and be like how dare you judge people from the past on their actions that's not fair things were different back then women liked when men lied to them and pretended to be an undergrad so that-- it was fine back then it was fine and I just, no, actually this book was published 40 years ago which is just not that long ago Richard Feynman should have known that women were people 40 years ago like absolutely not it's not "how things were back then" what's wrong with you people, no, it's inappropriate then it's inappropriate now
Later the actual author, Ralph Leighton, of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is mentioned so perhaps the responsibility for what was included is his more than Feynman's. I think the criticism stands that the degree of sexism effectively celebrated by inclusion was certainly less culturally accepted in 1985 when the book was published than when the events occurred, and that's the point of raising the issue of why was it judged as good and proper to include this marginalizing anecdotes when his actual contributions to physics and teaching were worthy of celebration.
I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book. From memory, he learnt the behaviour from other bar flies at the bars he hung out. And he expressed his surprise at how some women reacted. This was far from his upbringing and his experience with his fiancee.
The behaviour is hardly laudable, but "celebrated" it is not.
> I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book.
The argument presented in the video about this is that these are the stories Feynman edited and reworked over time, and shared with his friend Ralph Leighton, who then recorded them in the "Surely You're Joking" book.
The video also describes a change in his behavior later in life. In 1974, responding to a letter asking to reprint "What is Science?"[1] from 1966, he comments that "some of the remarks about the female mind might not be taken in the light spirit they were meant"[2]. This is cited in the video as Feynman becoming more progressive between 1966 and 1974. The "Surely" book is published in 1985, and yet still includes the misogynistic stories. The video's complaint is that there should be some contextualization about views changing, like was given in Feynman's reply in 1974, but there being none it comes across as an implicit endorsement. I don't recall from the video if Feynman reviewed or edited the "Surely" book, which leaves it as Ralph Leighton's perspective more than Feynman's.
It seems a legitimate criticism that this book held up as an example of a good role model in physics doesn't try to avoid perpetuating bad stereotypes. It's probably egregious to say the mere inclusion of the stories celebrates their actions. But it's equally egregious to fail to even try to address the bad behavior, especially when it's held out as a positive example.
[1] https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
[2] https://archive.org/details/perfectly-reasonable-deviations-...
And…who hasn’t done offensive things, before learning that what they’re doing is bad? It’s a matter of developing self control and awareness.
His wife accused him of choking her when she interrupted his science. She also accused him of playing the bongos too loud.
This was during divorce testimony. She got the house and he got the bongos.
> She got the house and he got the bongos.
Both were likely happy with that outcome
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He was accused, in divorce papers. And it wasn't beating, FWIW.
I've watched large sections of this video before, because it gets posted often. It's a 2-year-old video.
Based on that viewing, I think the author has a chip on her shoulder about Feynman, and is dismissive about his teaching and books, and is set on convicting him of being a very naughty boy.
One of the things that stand out from the video: The speaker says that Feynman didn't write the Feynman lectures. Wrong. He wrote and delivered the lectures. If you go to Caltech's Feynman lectures website, they even have audio of him delivering the lectures [0] and photographs of the chalk board [1]. How could someone make a 3-hour-long video about Feynman and not even know this?
Feynman was an immensely gifted physicist and one of the most (maybe the most) engaging and innovative physics teachers of the last century. You can criticize him for embellishing stories about himself, but those stories are incredibly entertaining and quirky, which is why so many people like them. He was a big personality, and it comes out in his stories. He wasn't a perfect person, but no one is, and there has been a movement in the last few years to try to demonize him (mostly unsuccessfully, given Feynman's continued popularity).
Finally, if one makes a video with a title like, "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman," one can't complain about getting pushback.
> The speaker says that Feynman didn't write the Feynman lectures. Wrong.
No, she's right, just talking about a different thing.
"The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is a physics textbook. [0] He did prepare his own lecture material, but he did not write the book.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...
No, she's absolutely wrong about this. The book is based very closely on Feynman's lectures. He wrote the material and gave the lectures. Other people edited that material into book form, but Feynman did the lion's share of the work.
Saying that Feynman didn't write the book is just dishonest, unless you immediately clarify afterwards that Feynman did indeed write almost all of the material in the book, in something very close to its final form.
You should watch the whole video. From memory, the video author claims that the books are not based directly on the recordings nor on material that Feynman wrote himself, but rather on lecture notes written by another professor who had to cover for Feynman (who is also listed as one of the authors in the book). She also mentions how those lecture notes from this other professor correct some small mistakes Feynman made in some calculations and diagrams from the lecture. Her claim is that Feynman was not the person who actually wrote the text of the book.
I mean, for the most part the book is an edited transcription of what he said at the lectures (or, in some cases, what a guest lecturer said). But the lectures weren't scripted, and we know this because his lecture notes are preserved[0] and they do not contain anything like he full text of even a single lecture. They're just lecture notes, not a script. And of course, the book also contain a lot of example problems and graphics - those are mostly the work of Bob Leighton, I believe. There's a reason the book has had so many errata corrected over the years: it was never written and edited in the way a book manuscript would've been written and edited.
Seems she isn't interested in dragging a bit of fame and recognition her way.
It's a low effort way to do that when the other party cannot defend himself.
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path integrals existed since the 19th century
Cite an example please.
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What's this better stuff?
Shrek for example.
I thought you were going to say skibidi toilets.
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yt is YouTube?
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Note that this was before the times of no fault divorce.
At that time it was common to allege extreme behavior (often mutually agreed upon), to Trump up the charges just to make the divorce go through.
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.
The shit people tell you about themselves for free, unprompted. It’s unreal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My copy of volume 1 is signed!
It is very interesting to see completely different impressions of Feynman from comments here. As a physicist, I first got introduced to Feynman from his popular QED book as a freshman in college. Over the years, I came to admire his contributions and way of thinking but could also see the cult of personality that has formed.
Feynman is definitely not like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kaku. He was a very creative and technically sophisticated physicist. All his popular books are based on lectures he wrote and gave but they were mostly "side projects" e.g. computation, lectures on gravitation, six easy pieces etc.
To get a better sense of his work, I would highly recommend:
- The Beat of a Different Drum by Jagdish Mehra
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
- Selected Papers - https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4270 (expensive and technical)
- QED and the men who made it by Schweber
There are also many historical physicists who are surprisingly unknown outside the field - Schwinger, Tomonaga, Landau, Sidney Coleman, Murray Gell-mann, Nambu, Steven Weinberg, Ken Wilson, Curtis Callan etc. I just randomly picked a few names before the 90s but these are all scientific giants. For example, Schwinger's papers are notoriously hard to read but his books are great after a first course. Sidney Coleman gave beautiful lectures on QFT. Landau is extremely famous for his 9 books with Lifshitz. It definitely is very surprising that Feynman has such an outsized share of interest. Maybe because he was a gregarious outgoing character?
Another interesting aspect is how a person is often viewed as an authority or even a genius because their work introduces an audience to the subject. Feynman with his lectures. To a far lesser extent (in my opinion), one sees this with Andrej Karpathy and Jeremy Howard. This is not to take away from their wonderful teaching work. I know how hard it is to distill material and convey it. But, there's a whole web of contributions that leads to a subject maturing enough to be taught clearly.
As I get older, I find it less useful to assign labels (names) to discoveries and contributions. As Feynman himself said in a lecture after drawing a Feynman diagram, "this is THE diagram" (and not the Feynman diagram).
I believe this is the point you are making, but it's worth clarifying that NDT is a technically sophisticated astrophysicist who is best known for his non-technical communication targeted at a non-technical audience. Part of the genius of Feynman is that he could communicate to a technical audience in a way that was still accessible to the lay audience. Tyson can't communicate to both groups at once like Feynman (or Tyson's mentor, Carl Sagan) could. It's a rare gift.
Feynman had the vanishingly rare combination of being at world-shaking (literally) historical events like the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test that ordinary people can relate to¹, actual scientific contribution enough to merit a Nobel Prize in Physics, and being an engaging storyteller and educator. I don't think it's all that surprising that his recognizability very high.
¹ Ordinary people can relate to a giant industrial project and a huge boom. They cannot relate to some person sitting in a room writing arcane symbols and muttering to themselves until one day they yell "Heureka! Ich hab es gefunden!" or whatever the proper German is and rush off to publish a paper.
My point is that it's really the storytelling/gregarious nature character. There is no shortage of people who were at the Manhattan project and won Nobel prizes or were prominent. A partial list: Oppenheimer, Bethe, Rabi, Teller, von Neumann, Compton, Fermi, Segre, Ramsey, Alvarez. There are easily many more. Schwinger was at Rad lab.
Schwinger was considered a tremendous educator. I think he had ~90 PhD students and four won Nobel prizes. His lectures were often described as Mozart symphonies. I have studied parts of his books and the experience was always eye-opening. But, his education was focused on students, mostly graduate students. He was also a shy character.
In any case, I still love reading Feynman and Schwinger's works. I would also include Sommerfeld, Pauli, Landau, Weinberg in that list.
Sorry, my wording was imprecise; when I said "educator", I meant popular science educator, along the lines of Asimov, Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc. I can't think of anything Schwinger ever wrote or a public lecture that he gave that would be accessible to a general or even a semi-technical, non-physicist audience.
But, beyond that, yes, I think we're largely in agreement.
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.
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 ...
On the topic of lecture notes, I can really recommend Scott Aaron's Quantum Information lecture notes: https://www.scottaaronson.com/qclec.pdf
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.
I'll try to find it; thanks!
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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://www.routledge.com/Modern-Atomic-Physics/Natarajan/p/...
The recent book (free) Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites (2025) should also be good for an initial understanding of atomic physics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595
Also Wikipedia has a helpful Timeline of fundamental physics discoveries page to browse - 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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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.
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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!
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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
I have read the whole chapter, and my criticism is not based on taking a single quote out of context. Your framing reduces women in that environment to a single stereotype ("girls exploiting men for drinks"), and the suggested response is to adopt deliberate hostility and disrespect as a strategy; it is generalizing an entire group and justifying contempt toward them. The "lesson" explicitly encourages treating interactions as transactional and frames social interaction primarily as a negotiation for sex. Whether or not some individuals behave opportunistically, promoting that mindset as a general rule is ethically questionable.
Most importantly, the outcome does not validate the approach as healthy behaviour and even Feynman himself makes it clear at the end that the method was effective in a narrow sense but not enjoyable or aligned with how he ultimately wanted to interact with people. That distancing is important context: it suggests the episode was more an observation about social dynamics than a recommendation for how people should behave.
Not buying drinks for strangers is NOT bad advice. Best of all: he is right. Just ask women or people who party a lot :) .
Crafted by Rajat
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