There's a lot of mocking, snarky messages here but I want to write something sincere and from the heart. First off, this video is excellent, but watching the video was very challenging and harrowing for me. I a man of nearly 50, and when I was about 15 I read "Surely you're joking..." and "What do you care..." and the books were really transformative to me. I used to think that that was because Feynman helped me feel like being a bookish nerd was also a way to be a contrarian rebel. I started your video with trepidation, but your arguments are all totally sound and correct. After some reflection, I realize that the reason I liked Feynman's books so much is it showed me what it would be like to have a supportive and engaged father, which I did not have. Anyways, thanks for your hard work, this video moved me deeply for a lot of personal reasons, but I really appreciate everything you put into it.
Man if you don't have to be a bad ass genius then you have the space and lateral freedom to learn and even have fun learning. The advantage of humility and authenticity. Some ancient Eastern thought for you.
Without being snarky, those of us who are lucky enough to be successful in that regard can too easily find ourselves bragging about it. I've been guilty of it myself (you could even sort of accuse me of it right now). So... not that he *was* successful--because I wasn't there--but the fact that he said he was successful doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't. See what I mean? Some women are simply attracted to confident men whom they view as "brilliant"... whether he is actually brilliant or not. Women can "smell" confidence on a man... and sometimes, that's all it takes. (Be careful to never confuse "confidence" with "arrogance". They are not the same. And most women detest arrogance.) Feynman was arrogant with men, maybe, but he treated women very differently. That's my 2 cents.
@@USS-SNAKE-ISLAND Being "successful" was in my day, just a case of being able to ask a lot of women out, and not feel bad about getting a lot of rejection - eventually someone will decide to give you a chance - a statistics game, if you will - not one I was ever any good at due to taking said rejection to heart too much.
@@USS-SNAKE-ISLAND "most women detest arrogance" unfortunately isn't really true. Possibly a lot more eventually learn to detest arrogance after about their third marriage...
"I'm afraid to study, because what if i try really hard and still fail" is something i've been thinking about a lot in the last couple days, because its such a brutally incisive commentary on my character. Thanks Angela.
That's what sucks with having a Big ass Ego, and having to study hard because to know things you have to study hard. And contrarily to many, I never could get rid of my big ass ego, even tho therapy and all, so I'm perpetually fucked and forcing myself to accept reality and study hard. I mean, thats that
You should not try at all so that you never fail and never do anything great.That way you can get real fat, self-loathing, and other bad things. 100% give up. You will definitely fail.
We can all be comforted by the thought that he's not really gone, there's a little Feynman left in all of us, in fact you might say that all of us together made up Feynman.
@@ziggystardust4627 "I've got a gut feeling Feynman is around here somewhere. After all, isn't there a little Feynman in all of us? In fact, you might even say we just ate Feynman and he's in our stomachs right now!"
Thank God for Richard Feynman. He saved my life as a child. Pulled me out of a river, I just had to solve a brief physics problem first. The other kids couldnt do it though.
Richard Feynman: "There was once a 20 years old impressionable kid that would often come to chat with me in my office. I would tell him the craziest made up stories. And the crazy thing is that he would believe it all! He even went on to write some books about it!" (does the DreamWorks face)
“I started out trying to understand this person on a simple level… now I’m here how did I get here?!” - a demonstration of what, in music, we might call “The Tallerico Effect.”
Richard Feynman was the first American theoretical physicist to work on Sonic the Hedgehog -- personally selected by Mr Nintendo himself to design the ring drop collision physics.
@@joelcroteau9925that is funny too but they’re talking about hbomberguy’s famous “Roblox OOF” video which went completely off the rails into fraud and pathological deception.
my favorite part was when feynman said "oppa physics style!" and everyone on the bus clapped EDIT: I am now significantly further in the video, i must amend my comment; my favorite part was when ralph leighton said that feynman said "oppa physics style!" and everyone on the bus clapped
It brought tears to my eyes when I read that on his death bed in 1988, he told Ralph to come closer and he whispered his dying words “I may have been a physicist, but all I ever wanted to be was a Fine Man.”
Could Einstein play the bongos or open a locked safe? How about supervising the women who did much of the calculations for the A bomb? He also single-handedly explained in a simplistic manner why the o-ring failed on the Challenger months after the Morton Thiokol engineers tried to stop the launch for the very same reason. He definitely belonged on The Apprentice. Too bad he didn’t live that long.
I took a swig every time she said Richard Feynman. Then I checked myself into Hazelden - just down the road from me. Now I'm back and the video is just about ending.
@@karmeloxen Actually, the original quote comes from Walter Gretzky - Wayne Gretzky's father. Wayne first said it in 1983 to The Hockey New's Bob McKenzie, but later in 1996 attributed the quote to his father.
This video made me remember the time one of my male medical school classmates asked to come over one night and I said no, I’m tired, already in bed. Then he showed up and banged on my door for a long time (he knew I was home alone) and then called me a bitch and other things via text message when he realized I wasn’t going to let him in. I did feel scared and unsafe, but it didn’t feel like something I could report. It never occurred to me that anyone would take it seriously because it wasn’t “bad enough”. I felt like maybe I did something to encourage him like it was my fault. We were friends in school for years. I Am a pretty friendly person and had dated a couple other people in the school. I just ignored him for the rest of my last year of medical school and thankfully nothing happened. I’m pretty sure he’s now a psychiatrist. So that’s weird. I have at least 2 other similar medical school stories involving different men. Thank you for talking about this topic and making me feel less alone.
Something similar happened to my girlfriend in sophomore year before I met her. A so called "friend" showed up to her dorm and via text insisted she let him in. This was a bit after he admitted feelings for her and he didn't take it with any maturity. She refused, of course, but was obviously scared. He wasn't near so as violent, but he engaged in some similar harassing and stalking behavior after. The dude had the audacity to follow her and I to her apartment and decided to try to chat with her after I left. I wasn't dating her officially and I hadn't heard the story, but whenever they were in groups he'd do everything he could to wait until they were alone. Even tried to find out what classes she was taking next semester to try and overlap more. I was completely unaware of what he was trying to do until I spoke with her. She talked with me about the event and it only took me a few questions to tell her she was being harassed and stalked (another couple of events with the same guy strongly indicated that). I don't think she was super surprised by my conclusion, but it took someone else's perspective to believe her instincts. She's been talking with the counselors and Title IX office a bit and other campus authorities. She probably will only file a statement (and let the various powers know he's got a history) against him since he's been manageable, especially since we've started dating, but I wouldn't blame her if she had pushed for more consequences. Men: stand up for the women in your life. Be the kind of guy and friend that they'll trust to help them in these situations, not the type they try to avoid. If a woman has never told you about an experience like this, it's likely because you might be the latter.
In the video, Collier tells a similar story about a fellow physics student that she felt she could not report. In the video, she's suggesting that Feynman might have been this sort of person - that while in his stories, women almost always found him charming even when he treated them rudely, perhaps in reality they were uncomfortable with his behavior but simply didn't feel like they could speak up about it. I assume the comment you're replying to was a direct response to Collier's story.
Oh god, I can just imagine the Rogan fans saying they've been "learning physics"... After listening to a 7 hour Feynman episode about picking up undergrads using a French accent.
As Gell-mann said, "His preoccupation with himself and his own image began to get on my nerves. He was a very good scientist but he spent a great deal of effort generating anecdotes about himself." I'm suprised you didn't include that interview
I was a female "Feynman bro" in the sense that I idolised him and his books were inspirational to me as a teenager. In a roundabout way, they taught me that all sorts of people could be physicists, not just this image I had of a genius theoretician whose sole hobby was sitting inside and physics-ing all day. That was definitely not me, and while I clearly wasn't a Feynman either, to me he was a relatable, flawed figure in a way other visible physicists weren't. The whole "Feynman bro" personality cult thing seems a little alien to me as someone from Australia - we didn't seem to have that here, or at least not at my university. Alas, we had all of the exact same "Feynman bro" behaviour you described, just minus the Feynman part. I don't really have a point in sharing this. Just thought I'd add to the conversation from a slightly different cultural background.
I'm also in australia and didn't experience feynman worship as a common aspect of the regular bad behaviour. then again i didn't stick around in uni physics for long, largely because of how i was treated as one of only two female faces in my tutorial. i'm a bit concerned to see how many people in these comments are self-identifying as having been feynman bros, mostly based on having coasted through education up till the point where they couldn't anymore. i can imagine that this experience, when overlapping with collective workship of one figure and bad behaviour, results in a nasty and distinctive mix, but on its own, i'd like to caution people on demonising kids as somehow lazy or something if they don't 'knuckle down and learn to study' early. it's a pedagogy (and probably funding) issue that some kids are left unchallenged through school and get a shock when they have to figure out how to study long after everyone's stopped trying to teach them. if they let that experience make them obnoxious, then that's on them, but the shock itself is very natural if they're not adequately prepared, because everyone expects what works for others to work for them, or that they'll figure the rest out for themselves. of all things that one can figure out alone, how to engage with structured challenges is kinda hard when your structured work isn't challenging and you have to find challenge in other, unstructured places.
I didn't encounter any "Feynman bro" types at my Uni in America when I studied Physics nearly 20 years ago, either. I really enjoyed his books and found them inspirational, too, but never took the stories to be a blueprint for how to behave. I suppose everyone is different and this culture may exist now at some Universities. I would be hesitant to attribute the bad behaviour to idolizing Feynman. He was a relatable flawed figure, as you say. And as you point out, the "Feynman bro" can exist without Feynman. And Feynman fans can exist without becoming "bros."
Ironically, the image you had of physicists is how Feynman's ex-wife described him in their divorce filing. "He works calculus problems in his head from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep."
This may be generational as well….Angela is a particular age of Millennial where popular science communicators held a lot of weight in a science nerd’s personal development.
This took me a bit to get, so I'll explain for anyone who can't figure it out. At first, they are referring to Socrates as a figure who does a bunch of great stuff and has no faults. The second time, they are referring to Socrates the man who squabbled and made mistakes and such, but who is portrayed as perfection. Feynman is not not the perfect Socrates, he is the squabbly human Socrates.
@@I_Love_Learningalso, a large part of the "legend" atound Socrates is from other philosophers writing him into conversations that he wasn't in and may not have ever happened at all, to bolster their own points of view by having them either be said or agreed with by The Socrates, *The Smartest Man In Every Room*, so the authenticity of anything that "Socrates" did/said is questionable at best. In the same way, Feynman's legacy has been distorted so heavily by half-remembered decade-old anecdotes and workshopped to hell Everybody Clapped tall tales that finding Feynman the man instead of the legend is a herculean task
1:39 that "Newton. Einstein. Feynman" list in the book continues with Kaku and Sheldon Cooper, so maybe the point of the list was to plot a curve more like 1/x
It was a quote specifically about the fame of theorists vs the relative anonymity of experimentalists, rather than laying a real claim as to who the greatest physicists are.
I was going to post something about that list. New to this channel & thought 2 hours was an interesting flex. Does anybody on this channel think Einstein is anything that is used by engineers? GPS doesn't count (see Ron Hatch) and i've never heard of a 2nd instance. I want to know how Feynman could bang White undergrads and not get any complaints. Did he bang Jewish chicks? I'm not trolling. I want to develop FTL drive.
Great content. As someone who is finishing up their EE degree this semester, your experience really sheds light on why my program is void of women. My daughter loves math, she's only 5 and can only do single digit sums, but she's always talking about how she does science with dad. I hope brave young women like yourself continue to make stem in academia a more welcoming place for women, and I promise to do my part as well, for her.
Hats off to you for studying a degree while parenting a young child. I'm struggling (also EE) and i've only got myself to look after. good luck to you both!
"That's a woman who feels like she doesn't have another option." Such a simple but impactful explanation of what that type of behavior does to a person.
Boys will be boys…. Especially 70 years ago…. I think she needs a psychologist to sort the extreme amount of hatred of men out…. The one thing I know for sure is men will probably never change especially after the movement was wholly dismissed across all political parties recently…. It’s going to be a very long road to get everyone converted to anti-men status….
WAIT RALPH LEIGHTON WAS A SUBSTITUTE TEACHER AT MY MIDDLE SCHOOL IN THE BAY AREA!?!?!?! I ONLY PUT IT TOGETHER BECAUSE HE TALKED ABOUT TUVAN THROAT SINGING ALL THE TIME HE NEVER MENTIONED FEYNMAN ONCE LMFAO
After he was hand-picked by Miyamoto to work on Sonic, he convinced the whole team that he spoke fluent Japanese for the 2 years of development by making vaguely Asian noises and squinting.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426I think it flies because it rings true for the stories that Feynman told…it risks repeating stereotypes, but since the behavior fits the subject of the joke, personally I think this passes the smell test, though toes the line for sure. Compare the Uncle Ruckus on the Boondocks…it rings true too much to be mad at how problematic it might be.
Thanks for creating this excellent tour de force. A debunking, a biography, a fact-finding masterpiece. Entertaining, poignant, and highlighting potentially life-saving information. Thanks and best wishes to you!
Lol those "pretending to speak foreign languages and actually fooling the natives" stories reek so much of "how difficult can languages be if they aren't studied in STEM departments?"
"Always the smartest guy in the room" I don't remember who said it, but "if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room" is solid life advice.
As someone who has been in a couple of rooms where I just happen to be "the smartest guy", I think anyone who enjoys that and wants to consistently be in that situation just wants attention. It has nothing to do with contributing or making a difference. If everyone is just talking, nothing is getting done. And even less than nothing is getting done if "the smartest guy in the room" thinks and believes he is the smartest guy in that room and gets satisfaction from that realization. For me, I was really more of the "least stupid guy in the room" and when I tell you those rooms are filled with politicians and lobbyist, you'll also reach that conclusion if you ever find yourself in that kind of room.
@@angrymeowngi What have you got against classrooms? Teachers are all just egomaniacs, now? 😉 But seriously, I'm guessing you were an engineer or some sort of subject matter expert for the aforementioned political class? I don't envy anyone in that position.
Reminds me of the saying, "If you're the strongest guy in your gym, find another gym." Basically the same idea about only being able to progress with people who can push and inspire you and who may have more for you to learn from. Of course, no matter the room, there is always going to be SOMEONE who is the smartest or strongest or most capable or skilled or whatever, so in those cases you really want that person to embrace sharing their knowledge for the betterment of others, not just leave the room in their own selfish quest for betterment.
I mean, that creates a paradox - if people sought to be in rooms where they weren't the smartest, then why would smarter people want to be in a room with you? Maybe because you're nice and they enjoy your company - there's more to life than comparing IQ scores.
I wrote and deleted like six different comments through the process of listening to this video. Some were quippy, some were indignant and mean, some were delusional, some were facile. So at the end of 2 hours and 48 minutes, I just want to say thank you. You clearly put a lot of time and effort into this video, and I just want you to know that I appreciate it, and will be thinking about what you've said here for a while to come.
@kubadzejkob332 I read the “Surely you’re joking” book when I was about 20. I identified with his character a lot, also being a clever fast-talking New Yorker, with similar confidence issues that I often compensated for by being snarky. I admired how he was a nerd, but also clever, multi-faceted, good with women (self-described, of course). I was the exact type of person to completely miss all of the red flags and creep going on. That was like 20+ years ago, and I hadn’t really updated my mental image of Feynman since then, so I basically went through all of the stages of tearing down a hero while watching this, and it took a bit of effort to sit through it all, but Dr. Collier framed her approach in her typically grounded and sincere perspective, which made me want to empathize with her and re-examine my own feelings on Feynman and where they come from. I wanted to respect her effort with my own, if that makes sense.
@@rycolligan That must have been a lot. But as I said to someone else, this realisation can't take back any positive changes Feynman caused in you. He surely made it easier to go through life, having a character to emulate. The only thing I see that would be truly shattering about this video is if you looked up to them for a long time and never peeked behind the stage. But even then, oh well, give it a week or two, read up, go through the motions, and let it go. You're smarter now - most people are still blissfully unaware of Feynman's legacy - including me! I haven't watched the video yet, but Angela spoke about Feynman being less than gentlemanly with women in another video, so I know that much. And yeah, there's a lot of stories we take for granted. History becomes legend etc. And I guess we as people just like telling a good story, hence why we got so many heroes. Hell - you could have believed in Santa when you were 5! The only reason you stopped believing (hopefully) is that Santa doing his thing on Christmas is just a ridiculous idea. There's plenty of Santas that aren't as ridiculous, but no less fictitious.
This is good the hear, @rycolligan. This is all part of a long process of making male-dominated fields truly accessible to women. Especially now, with so many women entering STEM fields.
@ Honestly it wasn’t so bad, you just have to engage your willingness to re-evaluate your stance on something, but it always troubles me when I try to and I’m confronted with just how much psychological resistance and inertia my brain will generate.
I’ll give you a hint about part of why Feynman bros think so highly about Feynman despite his book making him look like an asshole, and it’s not just because they are sexist and like what he did (even though that probably is part of it): they probably have never read those books. People who quote books about someone like this and idolize them very rarely actually read the book. Maybe some do, but the vast majority probably have only read selected quotes about the book, and people on the internets view of the book and the people it talks about, but they never have actually read the book. Just like how people who quote nietzsche and talk about nihilism have never actually read nietzsche and don’t really understand nietzsche. My guess is the same is true here. They only know about Feynman about quotes and other internet people talking about the books about Feynman who themselves have probably also never actually read the books (and on top of that they’re not even books by him as you said).
Hey Angela, I just wanted to say that your assessment of Anthony Zee based on the introduction to QED is 100% spot-on. I went to UC Santa Barbara for my undergraduate degree and he's one of the most hated professors in the entire department. Most students despise him for what he stands for. He's super misogynistic and out of touch and also clearly embodies everything else the "Feynman Bros" represent. He doesn't believe that women should be studying physics and he has been verbally disciplined by the department multiple times for saying so in class, yet no meaningful action has been taken against him to make sure he doesn't teach classes. According to some students I talked to, he would also get into fits of anger and occasionally throw erasers at people in class. Additionally, he would sneer at questions that he deemed "stupid" and wouldn't even try to answer most questions other than just repeating what he just said TLDR you're absolutely right about him, and fuck Tony Zee.
Throwing erasers was classic discipline until quite recently. Like a few decades. Before Snowflakehood was granted to all. And it only worked where students were civil enough to not throw them back.
@@charlesspringer4709 Even if you agree with corporal punishment as a discipline tool (which I don't at all), using it on college students for asking questions is totally inappropriate either way. Zee doesn't teach lecture courses with 200 students, half of whom are asleep or not paying attention. He teaches upper-division elective classes with at most 40 students, all of whom are paying attention because they're interested in the subject (these are physics majors who chose to take the class). He wasn't throwing erasers as a disciplinary tool. He was throwing them because he's a jerk with anger issues
@@charlesspringer4709It only worked when there were few women around. If the price to pay to have more female physicists is a less toxic classroom, I'll take it.
man: hehe I liek hot ladies the field of physics: OMG HE'S SO QUIRKY 😆 HE'S SO WACKY 😆 HE'S SO MUCH NOBODY'S EVER BEEN THIS MUCH OMGGG THIS MAN IS THE WILDEST CRAZIEST CHARACTER ONLY A GENIUS COULD BE THIS WILD 😆 LOOK AT HIM HE'S KILLIN ME 😆😆😆
"A Swede came up to me, big strong guy, tears in eyes, and said 'Sir, your accent is so beautiful, but I must not know your dialect.'" -Richard P. Feynman
His accent was the best, the most beautiful accent. People often complement him on that accent, people who know a lot about accents. They're all talking about it.
I'd like to think that Feynman relayed that story with a winking sarcasm or that Leighton recorded it with dramatic irony, but nothing in what we know of either man suggests they possessed any degree of self-awareness.
In undergrad physics programs, nobody shuts up about Feynman. Including the professors. Then you find that one black and white vid of young Feynman talking about guessing and checking against experiment, and it's pretty charming. And you're a physics undergrad so that's pretty refreshing and your family keeps asking you about the last episode of Big Bang Theory and Michio Kaku and you need better heroes. But then you encounter him talking about the first time he realized "the female mind" can understand calculus because he alleged to overhear some knitting talk analogous to the concept of slope. And you should squirm uncomfortably, and that should be the end. But...I don't really know how to end this. Thank you Angela Collier, great channel.
Product of his era. You can nitpick using modern moral lenses and you’ll find something to hate every historical figure about. Just like us now, you think we won’t be judged for eating meat when they can make it in a lab in 200 years?
The thing to realise is the future will look negatively on you too for stuff you've done and said. You only have to see how statements of simple fact are treated as bigotry today to know that however much you imagine you haven't committed any thought crimes, and to consider that, unlikely the past, we all say a lot more that is recorded - we have quotes for everyone now, billions of them every day. In the future you are going to be that bad person who makes people squirm uncomfortably. Everyone is.
His pedagogical skills are also vastly overrated. I have never heard of a university using the Feynman Lectures as a textbook and, IIRC, the students who took his classes failed at an *extremely high rate.*
In all fairness, Isaac Newton probably also didn't think "the female mind" could understand calculus. People who lived 50+ years ago generally had some really strange ideas compared to today, and in 50 more years people will think we're just as strange.
Extremely insightful and eminently listenable. Fun fact Angela: I was actually in the audience for the daughter's speech and the hologram presentation.
The Ghost Writing bombshell is AMAZING. I have a friend who’s a ghostwriter, and the people who commission her genuinely think of themselves as having written the book. They think of her as a keyboard that they are typing on. It’s like those insufferable people who call AI image generators a tool, and that they are the real genius artist for coming up with the prompt. It’s astounding.
"Ghost writing"? The contents of "Surely you're joking, Mr. Fineman" are transcripts of audio recordings. If you believe Professors don't "write" their speeches, lectures, commencement addresses..., and can't tell the difference between an "editor" (Leighton) and an "author" (Feynman), you never worked in academia, or you are Angela Collier.
What's the bombshell? I don't want to listen to this whole thing to get it. "Surely You're Joking" contains anecdotes told to Ralph Leighton, and turned into print by him. The Feynman Lectures are lectures actually given by Feynman, recorded, and put into print form by somebody (Leighton and Sands, I suppose). Is that all? Doesn't everybody know that? Is that supposed to be scandalous?
I've not ghost written but I've been close-ish to someone who was going through the process of documenting their memoirs and having someone help write it all out. I wouldn't say that he wasn't 'directing' or 'authoring' that effort, but it certainly wouldn't be him doing the writing and I would hope he's not listed as the sole author.
Im not saying being an "ai" artist is like bejng actual master painter, but, even that is leagues ahead of being someone that confuses having a ghost writer with being the author themselves
@@maxw565 The videos and audio recordings that were transcribed for the book are publicly available. Somehow, one year of reseach was not enough for Angela Collier to provide any examples where the editor Ralph Leighton changed the text significantly, or at all. Three hours was not enough to tell us which passages she re-tells (instead of shows/reads) were removed by the authors' [sic] request before she was born? Or to show us any of the countless misogynistic and sexist passages that allegedly remained in the book, on screen?
I met Mr Feynman in Zambia, or as it was known then, Northern Rhodesia. He convinced me he was Bantu African. I wasn't aware of his celebrity at the time, He told me his name was Dick. I said, "you got that right". I'll say more when my ghostwriter is finished.
similarly to you, I was told about Feynman as a child interested in physics. I was obsessed with "surley you're joking". I read it over and over again as a girl, I'm not too sure why ten year old me was so fascinated by it. over a decade later I picked the book up when I was moving out, had a bit of reading and was shocked by the misogyny in the book. as someone who used to admire Feynman and grew out of it, this was a video that hit very close to home. thank you for this, it was fascinating and clearly thoroughly researched and written.
This is, by a wide margin, the best 3-hour analysis of Richard Feynman I have ever seen. Thank you. Have you considered writing a book? There's bound to be a big market for it, especially with Feynman's name on the cover and a big picture of him being good-looking and quirky. Please consider this, the world is starving for more Feynman books.
@@jonathanlink2071 Someone really should, if they haven't already, do word counts on long-form YT commentary like these and compare it to non-fiction books pre-smartphone era. The last non-fiction audiobook I listened to was ~7h30m but I wonder how much of that, assuming it's the average, is just from vocal performance differences.
@@hoodedferret According to youtube's vaguely-okay transcription and 'wc', this video is just shy of 29317 words. According to several sources, the average non-fiction book is in the ballpark of 50k words, though some sites claim that recently the word counts of NYT Bestsellers (including non-fiction) are trending shorter. So, yeah, an editor and fleshing out things a bit could easily turn this video's script into a non-fiction takedown, but as you can see in the desc there's already a few like this. (I'd buy one by Angela, anyway, because getting this sort of thing to the top of the bestseller list is a net positive, culture war be damned.)
Almost all of which have NOTHING to do with Feynman. She blames Feynman for the fact that he's admired by assholes just as much as normal, polite people. Which makes HER as much, or more, of an asshole as what she's trying to insinuate Feynman to have been.
It'll never not baffle me how underappreciated Maxwell's work appears to be in the public's eye. And sometimes when there is a list of the "most important physicists" and the name does come up, it's near the end.
@@maksimyasko2092 Yes, indeed. Boltzmann was seminal in making the concept of atoms central to physics in the 20th century (which was the century of quantum theory, atomic and nuclear science, radars, transistors, lasers, optical fibers, information age).
@@jamesleishman8025 The triumph of vector algebra over quaternion algebra, Grassmannian algebra (and Clifford algebra) led to Physics' fragmentation into numerous mathematical fiefdoms ruled by the various flavors of higher mathematics with their disparate notations instead of the universal geometric algebra originally envisioned by Leibniz. Higher Mathematics became the stumbling block for most people to be able to understand and do physics and hindered the unification of Physics for at least one century. No, Gibbs shouldn't be honored because of his being a culprit in the travesty.
Can you speak more about this? It sounds intriguing. I feel von Neumann is similar too, an undoubtedly brilliant individual whose true reality is unlikely to match how his fabled ability is talked about. Anecdotes and stories on the verge of tall tales.
@@lucidjar side note but i think von Neumann truly was the greatest evil genius that humanity has had to offer so far. dude majorly contributed to the Manhattan project and alongwith groves wanted to bomb kyoto which had a population of 3 mil in 45 which was higher than the combined population of hiroshima & nagasaki. he personally did all the calculations to evaluate the damage and death the blast would cause and listed it as a major candidate cos it was the cultural capital of Japan for 11 centuries and they thought bombing it would cause the most psychological trauma. dude was a staunch Anti communist and worked closely with the DOD his entire life. His intellectual accomplishments in physics, math, computer science etc is also absolutely unparalleled and can only be best described as genius. i should also mention that it was secretary of war stimson who while still complicit in the bombings, got kyoto removed as a candidate cos he was horrified by the prospect of bombing kyoto specifically, partly because he was there for his honeymoon & understood that the city had immense cultural value for the japanese people.
@@lucidjar Erdos has a reputation of being eccentric, kind of like Feynman. I'm less familiar with von Neumann, but the stories that I've heard of him were just about how smart he was. Edit: I haven't watched the video yet, but people seem to be talking about misogyny. Again, I don't think I've heard anything specific about von Neumann. However, Erdos apparently had a quirky vocabulary where, for example, he called children "epsilon" and a mathematical lecture a "sermon". He also said that married men were "slaves", and divorced men were "liberated".
Matt...Matt Colville???? I feel like I shouldn't be surprised to see you in the comments, but also I was not expecting to see one of the DnD youtubers I follow randomly comment on a 2+ hour physics video.
This contextualizes so much for me. I had a Feynman book thrust at me when I was 10 or 12. Fortunately it wasn’t Surely You’re Joking, it was The Meaning of It All, but I do recall being a bit disappointed at the time that the book was compiled from lectures rather than written by Feynman, and also that it didn’t really have any science in it. As you say, it was given to me because an older relative thought that, as a “young man who is interested in science,” it was something that I ought to read. I must have encountered Feynman diagrams at some point in college, but physics isn’t my field, I work in Aerospace. Feynman’s actual scientific work has always felt kind of abstract to me (I realize that this may not be a unique complaint). Early in my career I did encounter the appendix Feynman wrote for the Rogers Commission report (appendix F, appropriately), and I was impressed by some of the observations he made, especially relating to the disconnect between engineering and management on probability of mission failure. A lot of that didn’t necessarily require a world class physicist, it’s a human problem and not a physics problem or a math problem. It needed an outsider who had access and who didn’t hold any particular reverence for the organizational hierarchy of NASA. I never looked into the stories that much, although I was generally aware that he was a bit of self-aggrandizing bullshitter. The accounts of faking foreign languages, which I’d read about, line up with that. I always suspected that some of the stories, like the painter story, were intended more as parables than as true accounts. This video really fits all those jagged pieces of Feynman that I’d come across over the years together into a whole that makes sense to me. I didn’t know about Ralph Leighton, or that Feynman didn’t actually write any of the Feynman books. I didn’t know about the domestic violence with his second wife either. The conjecture that some of his behavior and casual sexism may have been due to insecurities about his masculinity tracks as reasonable to me, although I guess it’s not possible to confirm the inner thoughts of a man who’s been dead thirty some years. I didn’t plan to get sucked into a three hour video about Richard Feynman. I clicked on it because I feel a morbid fascination with any takedown or attempted takedown of a revered public figure. I expected to only watch five or ten minutes of it, but there’s a lot more here than just “that guy that everyone likes is secretly a huge asshole.” This really was a journey. I enjoyed watching it. I feel like something that I’d always found confusing and sort of difficult to reconcile makes a bit more sense to me now. I’ll definitely think differently about Feynman from now on.
As a U.S. citizen I have been musing recently on how absolutely detrimental cult of personality can be. This video looks like it's going to be a somewhat painful watch (I enjoy the surface level Feynman mythos), but I have a feeling I'll be in a better place on the other side of it. I give you thanks!
I agree, i just think his books and things are fun. It didn't take very many chapters for it to become obvious that many stories are heartily extended for gaffs, goofs, and the occasional philosophy. I think it would be crazy to believe everything he ever wrote lmao. But apart from the personality i do still idolize his contributions to theoretical physics. The path integral, quantum electrodynamics, even just down to the integral trick he popularized. I remember him centrally for his ability to communicate physics very very well, his intelligence and contributions to the field, and his warm personality. But we all must know the tragedies of the world these days, so i will proceed to watch this video and hope it's at least unbiased. I trust Angela though
I'm sure it's at least partially a function of the era he worked during, but I also have never heard a single word negative about Maxwell-not that he was abusive towards his spouse or had inappropriate relations with a student or blood relative, not that he was a eugenicist or anti-suffrage, not even that he undermined a rival's career.
@@GSBarlev I've heard some comments on one channel on 'stealth tech' that outright says Maxwell was not very nice to people not as smart as he was, and he almost always considered himself the smartest person in the room ..., smartest in all objective probability, but not someone with a good sense of humanity ...
Probably all great physicists would give similar credit to previous work they built on. Except Euler. "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Was this how mormonism and other religions started? Some vulnerable dude simping for another dude's tall tales and deifying him and us the flock not bothering to question things?
My graduate advisor did his post-doc at Caltech back in the day when you used overhead projectors during your talk. You would project your transparencies on the wall behind you, moving a sheet of paper to block the text until you were ready to show it. He told me this story. During seminars Feynman used to have a bad habit of allowing the speaker to do all of the math and then shouting out the answer before the speaker revealed it. He did this one time and the speaker then moved the paper to reveal "I knew that damn Feynman was going to yell out the answer!"
I had to put up with that in lectures also. It was imensely irritating. "No, you cant read on and see how it fits together; you have to wait until I reveal the next line to you". The thing is,
A few words at a time is immensely annoying and meant I spent my time being so annoyed by their game-playing that it seriously detracted from me being able to focus on what they were saying. Just put up the whole page, and then talk though it, line by line. If I lose track, I can then look forward to see where they are going, which will put the earlier stuff in context.
Of course I also had a fourth semester calculus professor who was doing a complex pole integration and after about 15 minutes of writing everything out was on the verge of scribbling the answer when one of my classmates yelled out same. I remember him just turning to the student and yelling "You d*ck!"
I kinda floated through "Surely You're Joking!" when I read it 10 years ago and was overall charmed by it. That one stuck out as him just being a, well, dick.
@@DioJeans I have too, bc this is both a) good red-flag identification and self-preservation; and b) the morally correct reaction. There is no truer indicator of capacity-for-empathy than treatment of menial service workers.
Percussionist here: I found your video in my recommendations. Watching in parts, so I only made it to 38:03 and I don’t know if you address his musicianship, but I just wanted to say that his tone on the bongos is shit. Sounds like a cardboard box.
If you're into science and want to try getting deeper than most videos, this channel is great! That's all personal preference, though. For me, I just know that I can't watch when I'm in a mood/mode where I have to rewind if I start getting lost. Also, while I'm not a musician by any means, I did find the bongos and chanting annoying. (Not Angela's fault, mind you. And it was funny, at least.) On percussion, recently, I got sucked into a video series where a company that makes music learning material gets professional musicians in to challenge them. My favorite so far is the Jazz percussionist/professor who had to come up with percussion for a Nirvana song with the percussion removed. And then for the follow-up, he brought his band and they workshopped and improvised a multi-style re-interpretation of another Nirvana classic. I know nothing about the brand behind the channel/channels, since I'm not in the market, but that's probably my ideal brand content.
I clicked on this video and immediately thought 'there's just no way I'm going to watch a nearly 3hr+ video on Feynman from some rando' but that's exactly what I did, and I'm the better for watching it! Really fascinating insight, very funny at times, awfully cringe at other times, thank you so much for such a great vid!
Coming from theoretical particle physics, I'm continuously surprised how little of Feynman's physics is actually relevant. The part of Feynman's work that he did that I've ever used is QED and Feynman variables. Feynman variables are an integration technique, sort of like u-substitutions but more complicated. QED would be quite significant, but he's extremely lucky to have gotten credit for that. Frank CLose in "The Infinity Puzzle" discusses a lot of this history, but Schwinger had completely finished QED and presented it over two days at a conference. Feynman was almost completely forgotten at that conference, and the most notable thing about his presentation was how bad it was. All he had were a bunch of Stueckelberg diagrams (they had yet to be renamed after Feynman), couldn't explain any of the math, had no conceptual explanations of anything he was talking about, and no concrete results from his work to indicate that he had really done something. Dirac asked him a question which may not have been adequately answered (hard to tell with Dirac -- he simply moved back to the wall he had been standing at). Bohr got so annoyed with Feynman being unable to answer his question, that he went up to the stage, took the chalk out of Feynman's hand, and began lecturing Feynman on basic quantum mechanics. Feynman, in interviews and probably his dictated 'writings', is quite upfront with trying to create a facade for himself and a mythos around him and was happy to play politics to that end... which is exactly what you need to do with the Nobel committee in order to win the prize. Partons? Bjorken, who recently died this past year, worked out the quart model based on Gell-Mann's Eightfold Way (Gell-Mann actually never thought quarks were real and, being an asshole himself, had no problem yelling at people for being morons for thinking quarks existed... right up until they were discovered). The parton model was a competing model that didn't explain the data while Bjorken did, was used to explain the data, and was the theoretical model that SLAC was trying to validate and the only reason anyone thought it was worth searching for quarks. Even with the Challenger disaster, it wasn't just the General that Sally Ride had talked to. Multiple people had figured it out (possibly only because of Sally Ride's initial tip, it's not clear on how many groups may have been involved behind the scenes) but for various political reasons, didn't want to be the person to present the information and wanted the independent scientist to be the person. So, Feynman had multiple people asking him questions about the weather, and material properties, and o-rings. And it wasn't until one of the other committee members had him over for dinner, and then, after dinner, brought him into his garage and showed him an o-ring and a glass of ice water. It was only then did he put it all together. In retrospect he realized that he was only there to be the guy to present what everyone already knew and that everyone was leading him by the nose while he thought he was being some trailblazing, iconoclastic, maverick doing whatever he wanted. He's talked about this explicitly, and I don't understand how people listen to this and think he was the trailblazing, iconoclastic, maverick. Female Feynman Bros do exist (I usually refer them to Feynman cultists, and the Bros may be a subset of that). Probably the first time I realized something was wrong with the mythology was a conversation I had with two grads during my undergrad. One of them had gone to a university down in Southern California for his undergrad (not Caltech, one of the UCs though I don't remember which one) and one of the professors there was an emeritus professor who professor who apparently spent her time just hanging out around the department (now that she was emeritus) and saying things like, "Feynman gave me all the physics that I could swallow". The other grad worked with my advisor and she said absolutely nothing during either that exchange or as I tried to explain to the first grad how disturbing and inappropriate all of this was. I think about this exchange a lot... The second time I realized things were rotten with the cult (that there was a cult) was when I finally looked up whole 'bongo drums caused his second wife to divorce him'. I'm really glad that got included in this video (I had written out the explanation about an hour before). The legend always sat weird with me because how do you marry someone like Feynman and not know, at least, that he would be thinking about math a lot of the time and also hate him for doing math? Finally looking up the divorce papers (thanks FBI surveillance and FOIA?) and seeing the actual reason -- violent rages -- that gets let out of the legend was eye opening. She wasn't some fun-hating idiot who couldn't appreciate math, but rightfully fearful for her life and needed to escape a psycho. The cult of Feynman needs to die.
@@wubanizer The Dirac anecdote comes from "The Infinity Puzzle" by Frank Close, and he includes citations in the book. The FBI files are searchable -- Angela showed the relevant ones on screen; it's been well over a decade since I looked them up, and don't remember how off hand, so your googling would be quicker than waiting for me to do it. I don't have a source off hand for the surveillance specifically but it's fairly well known that everyone involved in the Manhattan program was being tracked by the FBI following the war. This was especially true for anyone with communist sympathies, which the FBI kinda of assumed out of hand regardless, but they were suspicious of Feynman (iirc his second wife told them she thought he was a socialist, but they decided, if he was, he wasn't much of a threat).
@@orthochronicity6428 I'm reading David Bohms biography right now and he got caught in that socialist hunting too. Actually he ended up exiled in Brazil for a time. Thanks for your thoughtful response, I appreciate it.
Using your personality and fame to take advantage of impressionable university students is messed up (evil in fact), especially if you are in a position authority. Such a person should not be lauded and held up as a hero, because this then tells young men that this sort of behaviour is acceptable...
@@feynmanschwingere_mc2270 : The leaders of the Manhattan project theoretical division (Bethe et al.) valued it because he ignored their elevated status and told them exactly what he thought. And whatever else it may have been, his "schtick" was not "contrived". I'm satisfied it bubbled from a real creative spirit. You are welcome to disagree.
Found the book "Surely you're joking..." randomly in my library a few weeks ago and picked it up as I had heard of Feynman and my dad is a phycisist. I could not finish it because I found it to be a long series of humble bragging about how smart he is/was. Interesting that I should stuble upon this video right after. You add a lot of great points not least from a female perspective on his actions. In Denmark where I am from we have Niels Bohr and I think its fair to say we have our own cult of personality around him. You get religion when God has left the building.
A contextual note about Feynman's reported domestic abuse: Married partners couldn't divorce without proof of domestic violence or infidelity, and so spouses who otherwise respected each other would conspire to convince a judge of one or the other so they could part ways. In the 3 years that my mother worked in a hospital lab, 2 of her friends there saved up money to hire private investigators with their husbands to "discover" their husbands with sex workers posing as lovers. Seeing this in the paper likely wouldn't set off too many alarm bells due it being a known divorce tactic.
Yes, and also note that the legal standard at the time was often "EXTREME cruelty." Yes, legally at the time you could be "normally cruel" to your wife, but for a judge to sign off on a fault divorce, it generally required an allegation of extreme cruelty. Temper tantrums wouldn't be enough. In cases where some sort of other grounds couldn't be proven (like infidelity or abandonment), assertions of domestic violence were common. None of this is to say it couldn't have happened with Feynman, but when it's the outlier allegation for the "real Feynman" Angela uncovers amidst his other apparently kind and loving behavior toward his wives, children, and other women in his life, it should at least be given some pause before accepted uncritically as "proof," especially given divorce standards of the time.
Yes. I knew this about divorce law and was sure the story was heading towards him having lied about something to help her get the divorce (I figured lying to get a divorce was something the FBI was investigating to pin on him along with talking to the Soviets). But I guess we'll never know if it was a true act by a violently abusive man or a lie to enable a mutually desired divorce.
I was one of those kids who got Feynman's books shoved into his face as a teenager. But to me there was another aspect to this myth. Since I was in a third world country across the world from California, it was to me a distant land of legends with physics titans who invented the portable sun. So in that way it was much harder for me to break free of the legend.
The fact that you felt the need to overexplain why creeps and belligerent men made the experience of studying unreasonably unpleasant for you expecting to be dismissed is galling in itself
@@jakobwachter5181 This kind of faux-zinger is all over comment sections with the person who drops it feeling like they've really said something clever. Haha! You got em!
@@z0uLess We're not talking about _men_ though, we are talking about a very specific kind of men. Creepy men. So, are you creepy? Or did you just misread the topic of conversation and it isn't actually about you?
@@z0uLess I mean she gave some pretty good examples in the video. Getting up just to sit right next to a woman you don't know to drop your pencil as an excuse to touch her leg. Following a woman home and banging on her door for an hour. Pretty standard creepy behaviour. Do you understand how that's creepy? Anyway if you study sociology I feel like you should understand the difference between "some friction" and systemic misogyny. But as somebody in a happy same-sex relationship, I also don't see how this kind of friction is necessary for love.
We have a version of these guys in philosophy too. Usually they've read one book from one of the "edgy" philosophers like Nietzsche, not understood it, but still retained the confidence that they are the smartest person in the entire faculty and will prattle on during lectures, while the lecturers try to give them not so subtle hints that they're talking out of their ass. Usually they drop out after 1 or 2 semesters, but some of them graduate and never grow out of it.
Never trust a philosopher who never, in his entire life, travelled more than 5 miles from his place of birth. Unlike Nietzsche and most other philosophers, Feynman actually had a list of very difficult accomplishments, each of which only a handful of men on the entire planet could have accomplished.
@akulkis You have no idea how utterly brilliant philosophers are, especially our giants. Oh, so f y I, you're very scientific disciplines is birth out of natural philosophy. And that's not even going into the epistemological biases of scientists.
Hello! I put this video on my "watch later" because when I saw it come up on my recommended, I was like, "oh, an exposé on one of my idols, I need to really sit down for this." Luckily, I'm not too attached to Feynman and I didn't like Feynman based on any kind of educated understanding of him or his work, I just thought some of his quotes were funny. I wanted to write something because immediately, right off the bat, around the 10:00-12:00 minute mark, you're talking about your undergraduate experience with "Feynman bros", and I have never felt more seen. Not because I am one, but because I'm absolutely surrounded by them, and I've felt so lonely and frustrated my entire undergraduate experience. And I'm a white man, too. I can't imagine how much worse these self-important dudes are when on top of having a God complex, they also don't respect you because of your gender or race. All of your stories, everything you said, I have such similar stories (except for ones where you were discriminated against because you're a woman, of course). I was at a booth at the start of the school year pitching Physics Club to those who walked by, and we were outside, and there was a guy hanging out that was telling us he was a Freshman just starting at my our university. He told my buddies and I that he was an astrophysics major. We don't have an astrophysics, just a physics major, astronomy minor. We had a solar telescope set up, like a nice one, a Coronado, and we told him to look through it because the sun was really active that day. He was like, "ehh, I have my own solar telescope, I'm okay." And my buddies and I were shocked, like "wow, you have your own Coronado?" and he explained that he didn't but he had his own scope with a solar filter. And sometime in this last semester, I heard the same guy in the halls (of the physics building) talking about his theories to someone else. I mean, maybe he wasn't literally talking about his theories, but I think when I say "his theories" you understand the kind of speech this guy was giving. That's probably the most Feynman bro kind of guy I've met. I think he tells everyone in his life that he's an astrophysics major and didn't want to be involved with people that would challenge himself intellectually, hence why he never got involved with Physics Club. I remember during an astronomy lab, the entire lab was to notice patterns and play around with Stellarium. Most of our lab group was working off of Stellarium on the school computer since it had multiple monitors and we could all see, but this one dude was like "oh, I've used Stellarium before", pulled out his own laptop, and did the lab alone, separate from us. For labs in higher level courses, I would always tell my group that I was the spreadsheet guy. I make nice spreadsheets, and I've learned that most of my peers are very grabby, and they want to do everything themselves. So I'd sit back and wait for them to tell me numbers. Most of the lab, I'd sit around while they argue over the setup and argue over the results, all while being grabby, just moving things, doing things, not getting data. Very frustrating. Worst of all, I was so lonely my sophomore year of undergrad (I'm a senior now, pray for me) that I asked the only physics major who ever made an attempt to reach out to me to be my roommate for the upcoming semester since he'd mentioned his lease was expiring. He seemed a little pretentious, but I really just wanted someone who wasn't going to party or hotbox the apartment, so I figured it would be fine. This guy I'm living with, he's not a Feynman bro because he doesn't really know Feynman and his attitude and whatever, but he's lived and breathed Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene his whole life, and he feels the compulsion to tell me about the Dark Forest Hypothesis and extraterrestrial life every time I walk through the apartment door, always describing things as a "cosmic symphony" and describing existence as "pygmyish unimportance". I am the least serious person I've ever met, and I speak in jokes 24/7, and to me, that means pretending to be the dumbest person in the room. I. Can't. Stand. This. Guy. We're applying to graduate schools now and his essays are all about his passion for physics, about how he got a telescope at age 13, and about how the burning questions of the universe keep him up at night. And the way that he just talks at me, I've never met anybody who talks so much. I'm a quiet guy, I've always been, and so I've always been a good listener. I've never met anybody before who *abuses* that. I never leave my room because I will get talked at. To prove to my friends that I'm not exaggerating, I've run a voice recorder before, and I have 30 minute long recordings where I do not speak. I leave my room to cook or eat, and he will talk to me the entire time telling me about, for a lack of a better phrase, his theories. Sorry for the ranting, but I hope that maybe other people can appreciate hearing these stories. Watching this video made me feel a lot less lonely. I think there's a plague in academia. My generation grew up on Neil deGrasse Tyson and I think a lot of kids wanted the image of being smart. Honestly, that's why I first got into physics. I wanted to feel smart. I think a lot of people in academia, though, didn't grow out of it. I've heard many, many people my own age tell me that they have always wanted to go into physics for some really grandiose reasons, phrased with Neil deGrasse Tyson vernacular. I don't know. I don't know the solution, but it's made it really hard to be in academia as a student. I'm terrified that my colleagues in graduate school or in a career are going to be the same. Unchecked egos, tying masculinity into intellectualism. It's exhausting. I'm such a (self diagnosed) fun goofy guy and I've made nearly no friends in undergrad, and the few people I have decided to befriend exhaust me. Always talking over one another. Always trying to dominate the conversations, "informing" other people of things they've read. I noticed nearly everyone in my life will end their phrases and thoughts with "um..." or always be trailing off so that nobody can interrupt. If it's not obvious, I've lost my mind a little in the past 3-4 years. Thank you for the video, I see you talk about this stuff more on the rest of your channel, thank you for being a voice about this kind of stuff!
hello, undergrad physics student here. reading your comment made me feel less lonely. i don't exactly know what i was expecting when i applied to study physics but that definitely wasn't it...i really, really just wanted to learn physics. i thought we'll be just bunch of confused but curious people who'll study physics. that's all. but ever since i entered that classroom, i feel like i've joined a war- not exaggerating, a literal war of people who are trying to outshine each other constantly. questions about things i didn't know, theories i never heard of...i felt stupid and clueless. i saw no shame in asking questions or being curious before but now i think twice or often thrice before asking something- is it stupid? will i appear stupid? i don't know. i was so excited, i was trying to learn about everything with questions. i've never been good at appearing as a cool person. i was never normal about anything i enjoy- i am the opposite of nonchalant. i always had to study very much to learn. it took me quite some time to grasp a new concept. but these people are different. they seem cool and clever and- i don't know. it's quite awful and lonely often times. i don't have the energy in me to strategize on how to appear as the smartest and how to make people feel small all the time. i don't get it. it's not because im a good, pure person or i love physics more than everyone. i really don't have the energy...it's so tiring. i try my best to keep enthusiastic but it's hard. idk.
Poor Dad always said to keep my head down and deescalate a urinal fight. Rich Dad taught me you can cut a piss hole through your enemies, all for under minimum wage.
@@djason338 she just skipped one week, chill mate ^^ I'm really liking this video and I need to pace it cause there's just so much perspective to gain on topics that don't seem to be on the radar of many people
Male here, I read Surely you're joking as a teenager. Being the smartest guy in the room was sort of my whole personality in middle school, and the chemistry teacher was a "Feynman bro" as you call them. I found this book online when looking for stuff by him that I could actually read, as I quickly gave on on the Lectures. Reading that book as a 15-year-old, I was not able to recognize the entitlement and misogyny for what they were, and having no experience in bars/women/safe-cracking, all the anecdotes seemed plausible to me. What I'm saying is I totally fell for the book. I became a more annoying 15-year-old, which wasn't the end of the world, and I acted very stupidly towards a girl in class that I liked, which I regret to this day. Thank you for the video, knowing the context in which the stories were told and the way in which this old man's anecdotes were somehow written down for posterity to affect a guy on the other side of the globe somehow makes the whole thing more comedic. I hope as a society we can grow out of surely you're joking, as I can't imagine much good has come out of the book.
14:45 As an autistic person I can say you have touched on a real problem within the autistic community. Some genuinely treat their autism like an excuse to be inconsiderate to others.
Yep, is ther edeserved leeway, yes, but its more social phopars, not about trying to be respectful, thewr is no excuse to not trying to be respectful to people, at least generally ,
I’m autistic (not a man, genderqueer AFAB) and I struggle with seeing this discourse sometimes because autism DOES make it more likely to be rude by accident. But after some thinking I see the difference- I’ve been accidentally inconsiderate to people in the past, but the difference is I feel embarrassed about it in retrospect even though it was an accident and try to be alert about it going forward. Now there’s also nuance to be had about the culture of shame and self-hatred and hypervigilance among people like me and how it gets unhealthy sometimes (I have many clear memories of being laughed at for an innocuous faux pas and it caused severe social anxiety for years)- the "it's not an excuse" discourse can SOMETIMES verge on the ableist authority figure logic of "there's no such thing as being rude on accident, if you behave rudely to someone it always means you hate them and are doing it on purpose to hurt them", and we've got to be careful to stay out of there But it IS definitely true that autism does NOT excuse these guys’ behaviour, even though autism makes it more likely to be rude by accident, because the thing with these guys is they aren’t even trying to consider in retrospect how their actions have affected others. (There's an interesting conversation on this topic about how our society doesn't push boys to develop emotional awareness but this comment is already long enough)
8:55 Outstanding Angela, you’ve nailed it again. I’m 54 years old, I knew about Richard Feynman from being a precocious teen who read Scientific American instead of magazines about wrestling or sports cars, and it wasn’t acceptable then. We all knew that. It’s just that people were able to get away with boorish behavior as long as they were interesting and quirky in a way that could be lauded at dinner parties.
Yup, it's the New York City storyteller accent and other things. Sometimes, they come off as being an unfiltered stovepipe, talking fast and loud, whatever comes to mind.
@@cookiequeen5430 I *really* don't get it: I'm in CS and he's more than a little retarded in that he's not using Ada in his spaceships/cars/microcontrollers. If he were *half* as smart as his branding makes him out to be, he's be aware of the Ada/C cost-effectiveness report [old, but very interesting], and the new[er] SPARK proving system.
Something I really appreciate about this video is the nuanced image of Feynman it presents. We are tempted to think of people as being all good or all bad, but it’s clear he had both good qualities and bad ones. As much good as he did for physics, he did significant harm as well. I really like your measured, well-thought-out scripting and delivery on all of your videos, but I think it has a chance to shine here.
Only a sith deals in absolutes. Binary thinking is a cancer on our modern world, being able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time is a skill we should all strive to master. Feynman was important and a jerk. Weinstein helped produce good movies but was an abuser. Spacey was a good actor but also an abuser. Its so hard for people to be able to live in world where good people do bad things.
I'm a 51 yo, relatively smart female, and I've always loved Richard Feynman. I first learned of him in a Physics Today magazine that I saw sitting in the science room in my high school. He had just passed away. But I have always felt uncomfortable with his interactions with women. Unfortunately, you're not going to find many heroes in the past without giving them a waiver for chauvinism. It does make me very sad. If you're asking what he's admired for, I thought it was pretty understood that he was admired for being able to explain physics to the layman. That's what he's famous for. Six Easy Pieces. His lectures are very funny and entertaining. "We used to believe that the planets were moved by angels pushing them from behind, flapping their wings. As you will see, this theory has now been modified..." He also gave some pretty solid social insights, such as stop bowing to men who wear fancy hats, like the Pope. I'm sure you can appreciate how rare it was to find outspoken atheist back in the day. Vanishingly rare.
Your response has poetic style. Nice work. It reminded me of the days in high school trying to write a sonnet in English class. Could not make either organization work. Later learned that it would be 10 years before my brain would first fully developed. This was back in the day when they were still hitting kids with wooden boards.
Angela Collier PHD, IMPRESSIVE complex, without convolution, or a negative Eigen Vector, equation of the Feynman Effect. F sub e is undefined in the real numbers, but in those systems invented by corrupted minds of mathematicians, using double imaginary numbers along the X axis and irrational numbers on the Y axis it possible to put all seminar attendees asleep! (As the great statistician Dr. Box PHD, said “ Mr Smith, you are a victim of your Calculus”. If he only knew what horror I saw in every attempt at calc 1,2,3, diffy Q, 1,2. I made it. Scarred for life. You are a great dual sport academic.
And if you wanted to be angry about the way women are treated today in physics, how about targeting the men who are their peers, who absolutely know better how to behave, instead of the guy who was born literally in 1918?
the speaker makes it quite clear she wouldn't have picked on Feynman if he didn't have such an immense cult of personality that directly influences her peers in the current day. multiple times actually.
It's ironic that in all of Feynman's personal anecdotes, he presents himself as the very clever boy who outwits everyone else, but in his approach to popular physics, he does very little of that. I came into physics surrounded by guys who spouted stuff about the twin paradox and wormholes and string theory and whatever that they got from Michio Kaku or Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene or whoever, who might well have been trying to share their love for physics, but seemed to produce a different kind of obnoxious physics bro, who thought that knowing that those things existed (or some theory of them existed) made them very bright (even though they didn't actually understand the things they were talking about), and I felt stupid and inadequate for not knowing about those things. In contrast to that, Feynman's discussion of physics to non-science and undergraduate audiences made me feel much more welcome in the field. This channel does a lot of the same kind of work, presenting physics as something that can at least sometimes be accessible, albeit with some effort required to really understand, and it's a really nice bonus that it doesn't come with the self-aggrandizing casual misogyny of Feynman.
To be honest, most of the wacky propositions (I won't call them theories, because to be a theory, an idea has to be testable, and none of that nonsense is testable) are utter BS. It comes out of the 1950's high energy physics community... Quantum physics doesn't offer any explanations or understanding, only probabilities, leading to what Feynman called "shut up and calculate". All of this nonsense is nothing more than mathematical masturbation, with zero connection to reality (especially string theory). I could have majored in physics (I aced every single physics test I took .... and these were all of the "physics for physics majors" classes as prerequisites for electrical engineering courses), and can read and follow the papers, but it's all just "look at what mathematical gymnastics I can do" and nothing more. I went into computer engineering so that I could do something useful in my life.
I think that is in part where you get into different kinds of people and personalities. For some people, clone kind of person is going to work better than others. I was never a physics guy, but the highly technical little professor types are more likely to be autistic. We have a tendency to info dump, lack social awareness, as a result are not politically correct, and tend to have a lot of issues with communication. That is one of the few traits that we share with the more debilitating kind of autism, is both we and them have issues getting information in and out effectively. In school things tend not to be presented in ways that work for us and can understand, so we rely on a lot of independent study and have to figure things out on our own because we can't depend on professors or the education system to match our needs. Hence we will be ahead like that. Also, having an obsessive personality type contributes to that. It is not something we can help in most cases, because our brains don't work that way. Also our traits can be extremely varied which causes us problems at times, because we will have a core strength in our area and be highly defecient in another because our traits are so uneven. Which is all to say, we all have struggles. With us sometimes out attributes stack to make us seem like geniuses or something in one specialized area, but we have to rely on that particular strength to compensate for all the other areas we are weak in. 😅 I think that is where she gets off a bit assuming being an "asshole" is by choice, and not due to a lack of social awareness and inability to be any other way. Also, I have no clue what her definition of misogyny is. How can you even casually hate someone? I do get being annoyed by the hero worship stuff though. That annoys me with Musk personally for example. But people that have some aspects of them that is exceptional are more likely to have a different view of the world as a result, and you shouldn't expect them to be normal in every other way, otherwise you are discriminating.
I honestly think you can find this type of personality in every field. Especially if there's a pop reference that manages to pull you in, ie michio kaku. I've experienced more or less the same thing when studying music and later on programming. I don't really know if it's age related or skill related, but in my personal experience I would say it's both, though it seems less likely you'll become a field-bro the older you get.
@@CapsAdmin That is kind of funny. I don't know if you are aware of this, but those two specific fields are linked-or at least they used to be. In terms of groups that slot into the spectrum along the high-function range that used to be associated with Asperger's Syndrome, we tended to get grouped as either auditory or visual types, just because certain attribute groups that tended to group would either present themselves with either audio or visual aptitudes. The group of autists who had talents in music were also the ones more likely to also show an aptitude in math and programming. I am a visual type, and so while I can program and was pretty decent at it, it was not as good a fit for me as my friends who showed signs of similar traits but who were more attuned to music. Not sure if they still use that model anymore, but that was something that we would e told a couple of decades ago. As far as "that type", assumed to be people who have those same autistic traits, I think we are far more concentrated than that. We seem to pool in specific areas, but as to why is a bit of a chicken or an egg argument. It may be that we have a certain tendency to certain interests or fields of study that appeal or are well adapted to how we process information or areas where our attributes are more directly applicable. Or, alternatively, it may be that those specific interests or field translate really well to adaptations and coping mechanisms we develop over the course of our lives due to some our areas of weakness. So, for example, because we lack social awareness, many, if not all of us, develop these complex internal logic-based constructs that we then utilize to navigate social situations and predict outcomes or what behavior is appropriate based on previous observations or events, with heavy utilization of things like grouping or categorization of individuals or groups to model potential outcomes. That is how we are able to mask that weakness. The fields of study that we tend to excel at typically involve complex logic-based constructs/models that involve similar tricks as part of their functional utility. The reason we are so good at those things is because we have been using and doing those things our whole lives. So, we are naturally inclined to any task, field, or interest that we can adapt those skills to, as they represent areas of strength. Further, points where things would seem more accessible to us compared to other groups who don't constantly have to rely on such methods as part of their day-to-day lives.. Coincidentally, it is also that sort of predictive modeling that might lead someone to theorize or assert that some sort of skill related to knitting might also translate to ability or aptitude in a particular type of mathematical study based on how things translate like that for us, and therefore is most likely not sexist or misogynistic in any way.
When i was a teenager i loved the book, it was about this great physicist that ignored the rules and was super cool, that could do whatever he liked and no one dared to criticize him for it. It speaks very much to the male teenager brain. It is only after that you realize that it didnt have any physics in it, that it was written by Richard Feynman about himself, that it was his own fan fiction about himself and it starts to taste rotten. He loves to talk about himself, say how cool he was, how he was always right, how his teachers was in so much awe of how good he was that he could do whatever he wanted. What is completely missing from the book is all the mistakes he made that he can now laugh at, how he got things wrong that really threw him off. How much work he had to do in order to understand something. How much he struggled with something. If we take me as an example i had a very hard time in calculus when we had to use sine and cosine, i could just not figure out when to use which when doing math problems.
A Zee was a professor at my undergrad university! Everyone was warned not to take the class he took because he was mean and sexist. He published a paper about the symmetry of womens breasts. A feynman bro through and through
The worst thing is when you realize that Feynmann bros are endemic to every major. I saw them in psych, philosophy, english, and in my education classes. It's horrible
@@jordonharris9098 Can we stop calling all assholes narcissists? I'm convinced people don't even know what it means anymore, like sociopath or whatever it was a couple years ago. You can just say 'people are douchey and awful sometimes' without dressing it up in fancier language (thereby making that language useless for the purposes it was originally intended for). Yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine.
@@user-zu1ix3yq2w You're doing it too. ToT You can just say they're using trendy meaningless (originally not so) language a bit thoughtlessly without jumping to wackadoodle conclusions about how they're a bad dude, so THEY must be the bad word of the minute. Everyone does this to some extent IMO (as in dressing up people being crappy in overwrought political/psych language). I'd just prefer we think about it a bit more and perhaps go, 'Maybe I shouldn't do that, actually.' I'm not tryna Uno reverse card anyone lol. Maybe my original comment came off angrier IDK.
@@nnhhkk867 Well said. The word narcissist is far, far, far too over-used to the point it's becoming the "literally" of nouns: a word so excessively used that it loses all meaning (to the point that dictionaries are now REDEFINING what the word "literal" means from LITERAL to factual, ughhh). I will say this, we are INUNDATED with narcissists (and I think social media has amplified the problem): Trump, Musk, LeBron James ("the chosen one"), and many others. I wonder if we have just as many narcissists as we've always had, or if the internet is amplifying the problem. A question for the psychologists I suppose.
I don't know if this is any consolation, but the 'asking inane questions during lectures to try and show off how smart they are' is not a personality unique to physics. there are lots of people like that ive encountered in computer science and (afaik) we don't have a feynmann-like figure to model that behaviour for them.
We do have von Neumann (who we share with the physicists and mathematicians, I suppose), Rob Pike, John McCarthy, Andrew Tanembaum, Richard Stallman. All assholes to a considerable degree. Not to mention the amount of assholes in the tech field, which a lot of tech bros look up to (Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Musk, Altman).
Oh, and Dijkstra of course, who frequently wrote and distributed rants about how he was right and everyone else was wrong (and people frequently cite them).
@@oskarlappi9593 Definitely have assholes, but do we have people to model same behaviour that Feynmann does? I guess the closest would be Gates, Jobs, Musk, etc, especially because they're in the same boat of being famous for being famous, rather than being famous for their actual work. Stallman is also probably the biggest inspiration for all 'erm, actually' moments, which is very much in the same vein as 'asking inane questions during lectures to show how much they know'
"I'm sure that female Feynman bros exist" Oh my God, at least one does. I dated an incredibly toxic female physics grad student obsessed with Richard Feynman and this video explains so much. Angela, I wish I had seen this video first and known what a red flag that was.
I was a female Feynman fan in STEM who already hated his misogyny and assholeness. But I never met the Feynman Bro criteria. Many of the stories in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman are about Feynman tricking people into thinking he's something he's not, especially making him look smarter, which calls into question everything he says. For example, IIRC, he tried to solemnly troll a colleague into thinking he could do a large calculation in his head summing terms through pure brain power, when he actually had found a mathematical shortcut. Multiple stories like this should clue the reader into realizing he's an unreliable narrator. This is in addition to what Angela already discussed about his unbelievable interactions with women, and faking speaking a language to a native speaker. She explained why these are fake better than I ever could. It was deeply cathartic. After watching this, I am no longer a Feynman fan and feel embarrassed, but like before, there are some useful lessons to learn from him (and most male scientists and authors) that are unrelated to their misogyny. For example, he showed it's possible to simplify scientific explanations so it's more accessible.
@@bricaaron3978 EYOOOOOOOOO WE GOT A DEBRATE BRO IN THE HOUSE Y'ALL SQUARE UP, THEY'RE COMING AT US WITH TATTOOS ON THEIR KNUCKLES ONE READS "FACTS" THE OTHER READS "LOGIC"
Hollywood, listen up: Angela has teed up a *goldmine* of a film-an adaptation of _Surely You're Joking,_ *leaning in all the way* into the dramatic irony angle. Feyman spends the whole film going around doing incredibly cringey things thinking he's awesome while everyone around him is just so incredibly embarrassed on his behalf. Also: the thing about Bob and Ralph Leighton reminds me of when F1 driver Carlos Sainz Jr. was asked who his idol was, he answered Fernano Alonzo and not, you know, legendary racecar driver Carlos Sainz Sr.
Main issue is that, given the current landscape of media comprehension, a bunch of feyman bros would watch it and end up feeling that the movie is about how awesome feyman was and how awesome they are by extension, no matter how hard you try to make it clear that they are being criticized in text. it's fucked
Also comes idea of barely accepting women as physicist during his lectures and at the same time mocking waitress for not knowing physics. Absurdly contradictory
11:45 "I know like I'm going to sound like I'm complaining way too much, but--" look, mate, even if you had no further anecdotes or experiences after that one, /that was enough/, because wtf. Like what the actual... what. What? What. Like, I know you have processed that this behavior was inappropriate and sexist but it also sounds like you've had to deal with a lot of people minimizing it so I want to reinforce/validate again that yeah that was messed-up and sexist.
*the anecdotes go on* ...wow. Also, you've just explained some of the question-askers in my Thermo class whom I always found confusing and frustrating.
I'd be remiss if I didn't add: for other folks going through similar things, Title IX, profs, TAs, and other school personnel are all official resources that can help, though it can be understandably difficult, especially when someone can cross the line of what's a problem/distressing/intimidating well before they cross the line of what's actionable, and sometimes those people just utterly fail you like they did in this situation. Unofficially helpful, fellow students who are on your side and know about the situation can help you feel safer and help bad actors feel less comfortable pulling their crap.
I watched 15 minutes of this video and thought "what could you possibly talk about for 2.5 more hours?" And now I'm almost 2 hours in can't stop watching lol. Your perspective is so valuable to the world right now.
15 minutes in, and all she's done is complain about guys who are socially awkward and other guys who assholes and who, DECADES AFTER FEYNMAN DIED, happened to latch onto Feynman rather than something else. I haven't heard one actual criticism of Feynman yet. This woman has serious issues, and Feynman isn't a single one of them.
@@akulkis ofc Feynman is not the issue, this is not a hit piece on Richard Feynman. It's a look on 3 distinct entities: Feynman the person, Feynman the physicist and Feynman the brand and her opinion on why the brandification is toxic and people shouldn't blindly create idols from people and it's better to look a bit deeper than the marketable brand.
I realized that one of the things about your video that bring me joy is the fact that you've found an eager and sizeable audience through casually discussing these topics. It's quite hopeful and nice.
I feel like we're on the verge of a deep analysis of our culture through the past 100 years or more. There's a lot of good culture analysis media popping up. Also, science history and culture is very important for future students IMO. We are connected to our history more than we think and we can not just learn a lot about our culture, but it will help us learn about scientific concepts and why specifically they popped up in the first place. I think this adds a dimension to learning that is very helpful and one we've overlooked.
Highly recommend Jenny Nicholson if you like this content. She's got a way with formulating thoughts, great charisma. Also ProbablyJacob if you like video games or oftentimes insane alien/cryptid theories. He's got a lovable snark I always found similar to Angela and Jenny. His video most similar to this format is "is cryptozoology just American shinto?"
@@glowerworm Big fan of both Jenny and Angela, think I've seen 1 (one) ProbablyJacob vid in the past and it didn't jive w me that much. 'Is cryptozoology just American shinto?' made my ears perk up like a dog hearing it's time for walkies, yesss! An intersection of my interests!!! Will be checking him out, thanks for the rec. (And sorry for the exclamation marks lol.)
@@Rockyzach88 One thing that's crazy to me is that my kid, whose 13, has been exposed to the most amazing analysis through UA-cam. I just did not have access to that sort of approach to thinking until college, really. High school English on a very good day. The internet is in so many ways awful, but having a generation that has seen how to take things apart and talk about how they work since elementary school is going to be interesting.
This video isn't about Feynman, it is about the classic male hero complex, delusion, and lack of self-awareness. I am sure many of the dudes you met 10-15 years after you met them, are realizing just now that they were total f*cking creeps. And you are badass.
I feel like the point about him speaking gibberish can't be overstated. Like- there's no WAY they thought he was speaking a dialect they didn't understand. They were soothing the ego of the Great Man, because embarrassing him in public would have been far, far worse for them. It's honestly disgusting.
Thank you, I agree 100%. That anecdote in particular really ticked me off as an immigrant who's had people be casually xenophobic to me. With the misogyny it's like 'disappointed, but not surprised,' unfortunately. There's plenty of precedent for nerdbro misogyny, but I can't say I've ever heard of something like that. It's almost cruel and unusual. Angela had way more restraint than me in using a Swedish person, my mind immediately went to 'Oh God, he's definitely done this to people from Asia or Africa.' Or just any country not as respected in science as Sweden, the social disparity there is clear. Genuinely shocking he (or those posthumously speaking for him) thinks so little of people that this would work or that this is a charming anecdote to tell people. Imagine a leading figure in your field, probably a personal hero, publicly humiliating and otherising you like that. (TMI but after nervously laughing it off I think I would excuse myself to the bathroom to have a little cry.) Insane lack of awareness. Respect the guy's contributions to physics, but even assuming the majority of the stuff around him is stuff he made up out of insecurity, it just belies such an unpleasant world view I can't think of him as a cool guy on a personal level.
@@nnhhkk867 To be clear about what's happening here, you just made up a story that he did racist things-and then reacted to it as if it were real. 🤔 The actual anecdote is specific to one language-Italian-due to a unique personal history with that particular language (hours of listening to Italian every day on a radio station during a commute). Neither did this occur with colleagues or students when he was a famous physicist; this occurred, in his anecdotes, 1) when passing a random Italian person on a noisy street and responding to their own initial Italian with his fake version; and 2)-the only time he claims to have certainly fooled someone-a pair of schoolteachers... who didn't speak Italian. It would be rather strange if he also "did this" with an African or Asian language, given the scarcity of !Kung-only radio stations in 1970s NY, and the lower chance of an African or Asian person assuming he was a native African/Asian in the first place.
@@nnhhkk867 To be clear about what's happening here, you just made up a story that he did rcist things-and then reacted to it as if it were real. 🤔 The actual anecdote is specific to one language-Italian-due to a unique personal history with that particular language (hours of listening to Italian every day on a radio station during a commute). Neither did this occur with colleagues or students when he was a famous physicist; this occurred, in his anecdotes, 1) when passing a random Italian person on a noisy street and responding to their own initial Italian with his fake version; and 2)-the only time he claims to have certainly fooled someone-a pair of schoolteachers... who didn't speak Italian. It would be rather strange if he also "did this" with an African or Asian language, given the scarcity of !Kung-only radio stations in 1970s NY, and the lower chance of an African or Asian person assuming he was a native African/Asian in the first place.
@@Kveldred Actually, as Angela points out, the story of fooling foreigners by speaking gibberish to them was not just a single anecdote: it is a common theme repeated throughout his "autobiographies".
@@BenInSeattle Yeah? What's another instance? The only other anecdote specifically about a foreign language I can recall off the top of my head involves him giving up on learning Japanese-not pretending to know it. But I'm not a big Feynman fan, so perhaps I am just unaware. Again, though, the person I responded to *_literally_* made something up to get upset about-not even "heard secondhand and jumped to conclusions" or something, but actually just invented a bad thing and then proceeded to fret over it. It is truly puzzling to me.
Still in the middle of enjoying this one but wanted to mention a small correction: the ERA still doesn't exist today! Doesn't change your point, it's just something I think about too much and get angry about too much.
The ERA is essentially written into the Constitution. Just gotta elect people that can read the thing, and leave, say, their religious beliefs elsewhere.
I have to say, the "Richard Feynman didn't write any books" revelation kind of just piqued my interest for some reason, but hearing that the layout of the first book mistakenly gave people the impression that it was an autobiography made my jaw literally drop and I have no idea why it hit so hard lol
Anybody who thought "Surely ..." was an autobiography just doesn't know what an autobiography is. It is just a collection of anecdotes, but they are Feynnan's anecdotes. The fact that he spoke them instead of wrote them is of no importance.
There is absolutely no way any thinking person could be mistaken about that. The author makes it explicitly clear in the introduction, and IIRC it even says "as told to Ralph Leighton" on the cover.
My heart is pounding with anger at the discussion about the Feynman bros and their inappropriate behavior. I had the misfortune of dealing with people like that in my senior year of high school but I was so privileged to go to a women’s centered university because the environment was so much healthier. I can’t imagine dealing with that behavior for several years and seeing how permissive authorities are with that level of misconduct and shittiness. Ugh, it makes my blood boil.
writing this at 1:21:00 so idk if angela gets into this, but re: him worrying about not seeming manly, there's a very popular stereotype of jewish men being nebbishy and unmanly and effeminate. as someone who grew up in new york he was definitely dealing with these sorts of stereotypes
your post sounds like damage control - many people faced those stereotypes and most of them were not sexists assholes about it. Probably you are not damage control on purpose, but whatever - its youtube in 2024... the higher chance belongs to the outcome where you are actually a sexist and also anti-human AI.
My uncle says that he met Feynman once. When he learned my uncle spoke French and lived in France, Feynman started doing the French gibberish thing. My uncle realized shortly that those weren't actually French words, but did marvel that it seemed to be a good imitation of French sounds, just not in the right order. So no, didn't "assume he was speaking a different dialect". Realized it was gibberish and was somewhat amused that it could somewhat pass for the real language assuming that the listener didn't actually speak any French. Feynman would've probably told it as "managing to fool an English professor living in France."
@@user-zu1ix3yq2w No, no, no. SMART people do DUMB things all the time. I assure you. Humans are complicated and hardly employ their logic universally. It's why you can get a genius who believes ludicrous things. .
@@user-zu1ix3yq2w Yeah, this doesn't make sense; the actual anecdote from Feynman is about a) listening to hours and hours of Italian on an Italian radio-station during commutes, b) learning a bit of real Italian and shouting it back when Italians on the street shouted something in Italian to him, and c), in the only instance in which he claims to have certainly fooled someone, amusing some children with fake Italian and fooling their teachers... who didn't speak Italian. This comment sounds like someone only familiar with Angela's misremembered retelling and thinking "hey, I can make up a good story to jump in here!"
@@KveldredFWIW, there is a song "Prisencolinensinencuisol" by acclaimed Italian artist Adriano Celentano which is entirely nonsense syllables. The song was inspired by what Italians sounded like singing American pop music that they didn't actually understand. The song has no official lyrics, but he sings the same thing every time he performs the song (and there are a LOT of recordings of it}. It's brilliant. When I first heard it years ago, I thought of that anecdote. The fact that an acclaimed Italian artist literally did the inverse as both a criticism of and a tribute to both cultures served, by my lights, to properly frame that anecdote and its spirit. If somehow I am naive and pollyanna for believing that Feynman did earnestly and simply appreciate this also, oh well! I suppose that's a risk I'm willing to take lol.
I would have thought refusing to read a play about a man making a deal with the devil only to make the world a worse place and lose connection to people he loves, then going on to work on the Manhattan Project, was an artistic flourish. But now in context, I’m thinking this entirely slipped by him.
In the story, Feynman says he actually read the play, but could not make head or tails of it, so he was unwilling to do the assignment and write an essay on the morals of the story. He wrote an essay about a topic he actually understood, and put in a few sentences at the end that related it to what is in the play. The moral seemed to be that you should not force children to make up BS on something they don't understand... But "Feynman was a science bro who was dismissive of the arts" fits better into this video essay.
@@KlausJLinke Hey, thanks for the extra detail! That at least has a perspective I can understand in an era before wikipedia, clif notes, or other more accessible resources.
@@KlausJLinke You know, his IQ was purportedly "only" 120. Which, in the context of this story, actually makes sense. He was nowhere near the polyglot others like Einstein, Poincare and Von Neuman were. His language/verbal intelligence left a lot to be desired (perhaps because he didn't read a lot of books as a child). You'd think a genius like Feynman could understand Faust. I mean, like, really? If children should not be forced to make up BS on something they don't understand, can't that same logic be applied to children who don't understand, say trigonometry, but are forced to complete homework assignments on it? I get that Feynman bros love the guy but, for a genius, he had several intellectual weak spots and wasn't nearly as diverse in his thinking as I assumed he would be.
@@feynmanschwingere_mc2270 Congrats I guess if you fully understood the ethics of Faust as a child, simply by reading it. I would not force a child to write about trigonometry, if it had not been taught about trigonometry, and "Faust" isn't an introductory course to Ethics 101. I think the story does show that young Feynman thought about ethics more than children that just followed the assignment.
@@feynmanschwingere_mc2270 I feel like mentioning his IQ is kind of buying into the narrative in a way... like if it turned out he'd actually scored 160 or 170 or something it would sound like it had invalidated your point. I remember how the dude who's technically scored the highest IQ score ever is some racist antisemitic butthead. My point is that IQ is basically meaningless for real life performance one way or another. I've seen people with low IQ achieve much more genuine intellectual achievement than idiots with high IQ.
I just want to add that the term “sexual harassment” wasn’t coined until the 1970s, and wasn’t popularized until 1975 by women at Cornell after Carmita Wood was forced to quit her job due to harassment from her supervisor in the (you guessed it!) physics department. So these women were enduring harassment from Feinman and/but didn’t have adequate language to describe what they were experiencing. Gross.
I can’t believe the first physicist to work on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise would lie like this
Especially a multi Guinness world record holding physicist.
His mom is very proud
Can't wait for the MTV Cribs episode
wh... huh?
hbomberguy reference?
He was chosen by Shiguru Miyamoto to play the bongos in the Metroid Prime OST
There's a lot of mocking, snarky messages here but I want to write something sincere and from the heart. First off, this video is excellent, but watching the video was very challenging and harrowing for me. I a man of nearly 50, and when I was about 15 I read "Surely you're joking..." and "What do you care..." and the books were really transformative to me. I used to think that that was because Feynman helped me feel like being a bookish nerd was also a way to be a contrarian rebel. I started your video with trepidation, but your arguments are all totally sound and correct. After some reflection, I realize that the reason I liked Feynman's books so much is it showed me what it would be like to have a supportive and engaged father, which I did not have. Anyways, thanks for your hard work, this video moved me deeply for a lot of personal reasons, but I really appreciate everything you put into it.
That's an amazing story, seriously. Thank you for sharing this and have a great day.
Ultimately, you grew from the experience. It's too late for any of this video to undo your progress.
Man if you don't have to be a bad ass genius then you have the space and lateral freedom to learn and even have fun learning. The advantage of humility and authenticity. Some ancient Eastern thought for you.
Completely agree with everything here, excellent video and I too see him as a supportive figure that filled the role of the one I did not have.
Feynman's Notfeynbros
"Feynman was super good with the ladies" said Richard Feynman, surely the most trustworthy source on the matter
Without being snarky, those of us who are lucky enough to be successful in that regard can too easily find ourselves bragging about it. I've been guilty of it myself (you could even sort of accuse me of it right now). So... not that he *was* successful--because I wasn't there--but the fact that he said he was successful doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't. See what I mean? Some women are simply attracted to confident men whom they view as "brilliant"... whether he is actually brilliant or not. Women can "smell" confidence on a man... and sometimes, that's all it takes. (Be careful to never confuse "confidence" with "arrogance". They are not the same. And most women detest arrogance.) Feynman was arrogant with men, maybe, but he treated women very differently. That's my 2 cents.
pretty sure his strip club trips did him in but that's just me.
@@USS-SNAKE-ISLANDDarling, you should rethink this comment.
@@USS-SNAKE-ISLAND Being "successful" was in my day, just a case of being able to ask a lot of women out, and not feel bad about getting a lot of rejection - eventually someone will decide to give you a chance - a statistics game, if you will - not one I was ever any good at due to taking said rejection to heart too much.
@@USS-SNAKE-ISLAND "most women detest arrogance" unfortunately isn't really true.
Possibly a lot more eventually learn to detest arrogance after about their third marriage...
"I'm afraid to study, because what if i try really hard and still fail" is something i've been thinking about a lot in the last couple days, because its such a brutally incisive commentary on my character. Thanks Angela.
same
Give yourself an award afterwards for a gallant effort, failing but having glorified the winner. 😊
"I thought you hated babies."
"No...just baby PEOPLE." 👨👩👧👦
That's what sucks with having a Big ass Ego, and having to study hard because to know things you have to study hard. And contrarily to many, I never could get rid of my big ass ego, even tho therapy and all, so I'm perpetually fucked and forcing myself to accept reality and study hard. I mean, thats that
You should not try at all so that you never fail and never do anything great.That way you can get real fat, self-loathing, and other bad things. 100% give up. You will definitely fail.
I was honestly expecting the final twist to be that Richard Feynman never actually existed and was just the result of authors quoting each other.
The real Richard Feynman was the Woozle we made along the way😊
We can all be comforted by the thought that he's not really gone, there's a little Feynman left in all of us, in fact you might say that all of us together made up Feynman.
That's actually the final twist of reality; the narrators are particularly chatty.
@@ziggystardust4627each of us is our own complex Feynman diagram, which when added together cover the probable and less probable Epic Feynman Stories
@@ziggystardust4627 "I've got a gut feeling Feynman is around here somewhere. After all, isn't there a little Feynman in all of us? In fact, you might even say we just ate Feynman and he's in our stomachs right now!"
Thank God for Richard Feynman. He saved my life as a child. Pulled me out of a river, I just had to solve a brief physics problem first. The other kids couldnt do it though.
That explains it!!!
Why did I read this in a bad Trump accent?
What an inspiring story! Feynman really is what we should all aspire to be. Complete bongos!
Hahah funniest comment I've read in this timeline
@@danskkr heheh ..: )
This is my favorite video by Richard Feynman. It's amazing how he's still able to produce fresh content.
Yeah, kinda like Tupac
Tupac was a good physicist but he couldn't spit like DickF
I was getting tired of the UA-cam algorithm recommending Richard Feynman videos, until this video popped up. Surely you're joking, Angela!
larger than life I tell ya!
We are the most coolest and smartest bro surfs up brahs.
Richard Feynman: "There was once a 20 years old impressionable kid that would often come to chat with me in my office. I would tell him the craziest made up stories. And the crazy thing is that he would believe it all! He even went on to write some books about it!" (does the DreamWorks face)
“I started out trying to understand this person on a simple level… now I’m here how did I get here?!” - a demonstration of what, in music, we might call “The Tallerico Effect.”
His mother is very proud.
Richard Feynman was the first American theoretical physicist to work on Sonic the Hedgehog -- personally selected by Mr Nintendo himself to design the ring drop collision physics.
I thought it was The Talking Heads Effect.
@@joelcroteau9925that is funny too but they’re talking about hbomberguy’s famous “Roblox OOF” video which went completely off the rails into fraud and pathological deception.
Foreshadowing is a literary device...
my favorite part was when feynman said "oppa physics style!" and everyone on the bus clapped
EDIT: I am now significantly further in the video, i must amend my comment;
my favorite part was when ralph leighton said that feynman said "oppa physics style!" and everyone on the bus clapped
Then he said "It's Feynin' Time!" and feyned all over the place.
It brought tears to my eyes when I read that on his death bed in 1988, he told Ralph to come closer and he whispered his dying words “I may have been a physicist, but all I ever wanted to be was a Fine Man.”
The lasting social impact of 'oppa homeless style'
Could Einstein play the bongos or open a locked safe? How about supervising the women who did much of the calculations for the A bomb? He also single-handedly explained in a simplistic manner why the o-ring failed on the Challenger months after the Morton Thiokol engineers tried to stop the launch for the very same reason. He definitely belonged on The Apprentice. Too bad he didn’t live that long.
I took a swig every time she said Richard Feynman. Then I checked myself into Hazelden - just down the road from me. Now I'm back and the video is just about ending.
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. - Richard Feynman” - Ralph Leighton
lol, underrated comment
Ahahahaha
Google Search does not like this one bit.
He stole dat fum Wayne Gretzky.
@@karmeloxen Actually, the original quote comes from Walter Gretzky - Wayne Gretzky's father. Wayne first said it in 1983 to The Hockey New's Bob McKenzie, but later in 1996 attributed the quote to his father.
After this year of research on Richard Feynman, you should consider writing a book by him.
+1
Let's get this to the top comment, guys!!!
This video made me remember the time one of my male medical school classmates asked to come over one night and I said no, I’m tired, already in bed. Then he showed up and banged on my door for a long time (he knew I was home alone) and then called me a bitch and other things via text message when he realized I wasn’t going to let him in. I did feel scared and unsafe, but it didn’t feel like something I could report. It never occurred to me that anyone would take it seriously because it wasn’t “bad enough”. I felt like maybe I did something to encourage him like it was my fault. We were friends in school for years. I Am a pretty friendly person and had dated a couple other people in the school. I just ignored him for the rest of my last year of medical school and thankfully nothing happened. I’m pretty sure he’s now a psychiatrist. So that’s weird. I have at least 2 other similar medical school stories involving different men. Thank you for talking about this topic and making me feel less alone.
Something similar happened to my girlfriend in sophomore year before I met her. A so called "friend" showed up to her dorm and via text insisted she let him in. This was a bit after he admitted feelings for her and he didn't take it with any maturity. She refused, of course, but was obviously scared. He wasn't near so as violent, but he engaged in some similar harassing and stalking behavior after. The dude had the audacity to follow her and I to her apartment and decided to try to chat with her after I left. I wasn't dating her officially and I hadn't heard the story, but whenever they were in groups he'd do everything he could to wait until they were alone. Even tried to find out what classes she was taking next semester to try and overlap more. I was completely unaware of what he was trying to do until I spoke with her.
She talked with me about the event and it only took me a few questions to tell her she was being harassed and stalked (another couple of events with the same guy strongly indicated that). I don't think she was super surprised by my conclusion, but it took someone else's perspective to believe her instincts. She's been talking with the counselors and Title IX office a bit and other campus authorities. She probably will only file a statement (and let the various powers know he's got a history) against him since he's been manageable, especially since we've started dating, but I wouldn't blame her if she had pushed for more consequences.
Men: stand up for the women in your life. Be the kind of guy and friend that they'll trust to help them in these situations, not the type they try to avoid. If a woman has never told you about an experience like this, it's likely because you might be the latter.
In the video, Collier tells a similar story about a fellow physics student that she felt she could not report. In the video, she's suggesting that Feynman might have been this sort of person - that while in his stories, women almost always found him charming even when he treated them rudely, perhaps in reality they were uncomfortable with his behavior but simply didn't feel like they could speak up about it. I assume the comment you're replying to was a direct response to Collier's story.
@@planthub9252 Clearly did not watch the video. Didn't even make it 15 minutes in. Why don't you try watching the video then delete your comment.
@@dustman96Where the hell is your empathy?
The psychiatrist twist took me out☠️
you just know he would have loved being a regular on Joe Rogan's podcast
Oh god, I can just imagine the Rogan fans saying they've been "learning physics"... After listening to a 7 hour Feynman episode about picking up undergrads using a French accent.
Oh my god yes. He definitely would have been in that "intellectual dark web" crowd. He loved talking and hearing himself talk.
He would go on JRE as one of the top 250 comedians. ( Surely, l'm joking).
@@subularreno We don't need the Rogan show to have that reality. Clearly, the books have done the job
This is spot on!!
As Gell-mann said, "His preoccupation with himself and his own image began to get on my nerves. He was a very good scientist but he spent a great deal of effort generating anecdotes about himself." I'm suprised you didn't include that interview
@@husamismael8926 He was a goof, for sure.
What, a three-hour long jag on what a bad guy he was wasn't long enough for you? LOL! Damn, dude.
Gell-Mann was not much better.
I think we've all had workmates like that - super entertaining a lot of time time - then they just go too far and become irritating.
@@USS-SNAKE-ISLAND i dont think you watched the whole video
I was a female "Feynman bro" in the sense that I idolised him and his books were inspirational to me as a teenager. In a roundabout way, they taught me that all sorts of people could be physicists, not just this image I had of a genius theoretician whose sole hobby was sitting inside and physics-ing all day. That was definitely not me, and while I clearly wasn't a Feynman either, to me he was a relatable, flawed figure in a way other visible physicists weren't.
The whole "Feynman bro" personality cult thing seems a little alien to me as someone from Australia - we didn't seem to have that here, or at least not at my university. Alas, we had all of the exact same "Feynman bro" behaviour you described, just minus the Feynman part.
I don't really have a point in sharing this. Just thought I'd add to the conversation from a slightly different cultural background.
I'm also in australia and didn't experience feynman worship as a common aspect of the regular bad behaviour. then again i didn't stick around in uni physics for long, largely because of how i was treated as one of only two female faces in my tutorial.
i'm a bit concerned to see how many people in these comments are self-identifying as having been feynman bros, mostly based on having coasted through education up till the point where they couldn't anymore. i can imagine that this experience, when overlapping with collective workship of one figure and bad behaviour, results in a nasty and distinctive mix, but on its own, i'd like to caution people on demonising kids as somehow lazy or something if they don't 'knuckle down and learn to study' early. it's a pedagogy (and probably funding) issue that some kids are left unchallenged through school and get a shock when they have to figure out how to study long after everyone's stopped trying to teach them. if they let that experience make them obnoxious, then that's on them, but the shock itself is very natural if they're not adequately prepared, because everyone expects what works for others to work for them, or that they'll figure the rest out for themselves. of all things that one can figure out alone, how to engage with structured challenges is kinda hard when your structured work isn't challenging and you have to find challenge in other, unstructured places.
I didn't encounter any "Feynman bro" types at my Uni in America when I studied Physics nearly 20 years ago, either. I really enjoyed his books and found them inspirational, too, but never took the stories to be a blueprint for how to behave. I suppose everyone is different and this culture may exist now at some Universities.
I would be hesitant to attribute the bad behaviour to idolizing Feynman. He was a relatable flawed figure, as you say. And as you point out, the "Feynman bro" can exist without Feynman. And Feynman fans can exist without becoming "bros."
@@riotprrl in Brazil we have plenty
Ironically, the image you had of physicists is how Feynman's ex-wife described him in their divorce filing. "He works calculus problems in his head from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep."
This may be generational as well….Angela is a particular age of Millennial where popular science communicators held a lot of weight in a science nerd’s personal development.
I used to think Richard Feynman was the Socrates of physics. But it turns out he was the Socrates of physics.
Its giving "there are two types of people: those who think Elon Musk is like Edison and those who think Elon Musk is like Edison.
This took me a bit to get, so I'll explain for anyone who can't figure it out. At first, they are referring to Socrates as a figure who does a bunch of great stuff and has no faults. The second time, they are referring to Socrates the man who squabbled and made mistakes and such, but who is portrayed as perfection. Feynman is not not the perfect Socrates, he is the squabbly human Socrates.
@@joelcroteau9925 This is such a niche joke but absolutely amazing if you understand it
@@I_Love_Learning I think the second time is referring to the fact that Socrates never wrote a book.
@@I_Love_Learningalso, a large part of the "legend" atound Socrates is from other philosophers writing him into conversations that he wasn't in and may not have ever happened at all, to bolster their own points of view by having them either be said or agreed with by The Socrates, *The Smartest Man In Every Room*, so the authenticity of anything that "Socrates" did/said is questionable at best.
In the same way, Feynman's legacy has been distorted so heavily by half-remembered decade-old anecdotes and workshopped to hell Everybody Clapped tall tales that finding Feynman the man instead of the legend is a herculean task
1:39 that "Newton. Einstein. Feynman" list in the book continues with Kaku and Sheldon Cooper, so maybe the point of the list was to plot a curve more like 1/x
It was a quote specifically about the fame of theorists vs the relative anonymity of experimentalists, rather than laying a real claim as to who the greatest physicists are.
@@PinataOblongataYeah came here to say this
ugh, you people... it doesnt matter if that example is not great if the point is clear and not something you can argue against.
I was going to post something about that list. New to this channel & thought 2 hours was an interesting flex. Does anybody on this channel think Einstein is anything that is used by engineers? GPS doesn't count (see Ron Hatch) and i've never heard of a 2nd instance.
I want to know how Feynman could bang White undergrads and not get any complaints. Did he bang Jewish chicks?
I'm not trolling. I want to develop FTL drive.
@@xBINARYGODx ugh, you people... it's okay to point out if one argument or example has a slight issue, that doesn't invalidate everything being said
I feel smarter knowing I've read every book written by Richard Feynman
And all his research papers? Apparently there weren't that many of them.
@@WallebyDamned Which we find were not written by Feynman. How smart do you feel now?
@@Heater-v1.0.0that’s the joke
@@dillonkaseysmith Surely you a joking Mr dillonkaseysmith :)
Meanwhile this dumb B has read zero 😂
Great content. As someone who is finishing up their EE degree this semester, your experience really sheds light on why my program is void of women. My daughter loves math, she's only 5 and can only do single digit sums, but she's always talking about how she does science with dad. I hope brave young women like yourself continue to make stem in academia a more welcoming place for women, and I promise to do my part as well, for her.
Hats off to you for studying a degree while parenting a young child. I'm struggling (also EE) and i've only got myself to look after.
good luck to you both!
"That's a woman who feels like she doesn't have another option." Such a simple but impactful explanation of what that type of behavior does to a person.
Boys will be boys…. Especially 70 years ago…. I think she needs a psychologist to sort the extreme amount of hatred of men out…. The one thing I know for sure is men will probably never change especially after the movement was wholly dismissed across all political parties recently…. It’s going to be a very long road to get everyone converted to anti-men status….
WAIT RALPH LEIGHTON WAS A SUBSTITUTE TEACHER AT MY MIDDLE SCHOOL IN THE BAY AREA!?!?!?! I ONLY PUT IT TOGETHER BECAUSE HE TALKED ABOUT TUVAN THROAT SINGING ALL THE TIME HE NEVER MENTIONED FEYNMAN ONCE LMFAO
whoa!!
NO COMMENTS IN ALL CAPS goddammit
@@rightcheer5096 you try to contain yourself when you realize your substitute teacher is the feynman oracle
@@rightcheer5096 ALL COMMENTS IN ALL CAPS! WHAT THE FUCK IS THE "LOWER CASE"!!!
@@ValStinks substitute teacher !?!? all this mythmaking , and it wasn’t even that good of a grift
After he was hand-picked by Miyamoto to work on Sonic, he convinced the whole team that he spoke fluent Japanese for the 2 years of development by making vaguely Asian noises and squinting.
he also knew how to program because phisics ...
This could be funny but the “squinting” bit makes it suss.
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426 how is that offensive to you but “vaguely asian noises” isn’t
his mother is very proud
@@picahudsoniaunflocked5426I think it flies because it rings true for the stories that Feynman told…it risks repeating stereotypes, but since the behavior fits the subject of the joke, personally I think this passes the smell test, though toes the line for sure. Compare the Uncle Ruckus on the Boondocks…it rings true too much to be mad at how problematic it might be.
Thanks for creating this excellent tour de force. A debunking, a biography, a fact-finding masterpiece. Entertaining, poignant, and highlighting potentially life-saving information. Thanks and best wishes to you!
How bizarre must your life be if this will save it?
@@whatisrokosbasilisk80 I don't think he's referring to his own life and I don't think he means it in a saving life from death sense, but I get you.
Lol those "pretending to speak foreign languages and actually fooling the natives" stories reek so much of "how difficult can languages be if they aren't studied in STEM departments?"
It's very Indiana Jones. "To infiltrate a Nazi base, you need not speak any actual German. A German accent will suffice."
@@JoeAuerbach hey hey hey now. Indy didn't ever do that.
He faked a _Scottish_ accent.
Does the Swedish chef not speak real Swedish? I have never realized
college level chinese kicked my ass this is so real
@@JoeAuerbach Maybe it was just German accent for the audience but he actually did speak German in-universe
"Always the smartest guy in the room"
I don't remember who said it, but "if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room" is solid life advice.
As someone who has been in a couple of rooms where I just happen to be "the smartest guy", I think anyone who enjoys that and wants to consistently be in that situation just wants attention. It has nothing to do with contributing or making a difference. If everyone is just talking, nothing is getting done. And even less than nothing is getting done if "the smartest guy in the room" thinks and believes he is the smartest guy in that room and gets satisfaction from that realization.
For me, I was really more of the "least stupid guy in the room" and when I tell you those rooms are filled with politicians and lobbyist, you'll also reach that conclusion if you ever find yourself in that kind of room.
@@angrymeowngi What have you got against classrooms? Teachers are all just egomaniacs, now? 😉
But seriously, I'm guessing you were an engineer or some sort of subject matter expert for the aforementioned political class? I don't envy anyone in that position.
Reminds me of the saying, "If you're the strongest guy in your gym, find another gym." Basically the same idea about only being able to progress with people who can push and inspire you and who may have more for you to learn from. Of course, no matter the room, there is always going to be SOMEONE who is the smartest or strongest or most capable or skilled or whatever, so in those cases you really want that person to embrace sharing their knowledge for the betterment of others, not just leave the room in their own selfish quest for betterment.
I mean, that creates a paradox - if people sought to be in rooms where they weren't the smartest, then why would smarter people want to be in a room with you?
Maybe because you're nice and they enjoy your company - there's more to life than comparing IQ scores.
@@PinataOblongata In classrooms, unfortunately the teacher is often not the smartest person in the room.
I wrote and deleted like six different comments through the process of listening to this video. Some were quippy, some were indignant and mean, some were delusional, some were facile. So at the end of 2 hours and 48 minutes, I just want to say thank you. You clearly put a lot of time and effort into this video, and I just want you to know that I appreciate it, and will be thinking about what you've said here for a while to come.
Sounds like Angela changed your opinion on Feynman. Am I right? And if so, what exactly did she change your mind about?
@kubadzejkob332
I read the “Surely you’re joking” book when I was about 20. I identified with his character a lot, also being a clever fast-talking New Yorker, with similar confidence issues that I often compensated for by being snarky. I admired how he was a nerd, but also clever, multi-faceted, good with women (self-described, of course). I was the exact type of person to completely miss all of the red flags and creep going on. That was like 20+ years ago, and I hadn’t really updated my mental image of Feynman since then, so I basically went through all of the stages of tearing down a hero while watching this, and it took a bit of effort to sit through it all, but Dr. Collier framed her approach in her typically grounded and sincere perspective, which made me want to empathize with her and re-examine my own feelings on Feynman and where they come from. I wanted to respect her effort with my own, if that makes sense.
@@rycolligan
That must have been a lot. But as I said to someone else, this realisation can't take back any positive changes Feynman caused in you. He surely made it easier to go through life, having a character to emulate.
The only thing I see that would be truly shattering about this video is if you looked up to them for a long time and never peeked behind the stage. But even then, oh well, give it a week or two, read up, go through the motions, and let it go. You're smarter now - most people are still blissfully unaware of Feynman's legacy - including me!
I haven't watched the video yet, but Angela spoke about Feynman being less than gentlemanly with women in another video, so I know that much.
And yeah, there's a lot of stories we take for granted. History becomes legend etc. And I guess we as people just like telling a good story, hence why we got so many heroes. Hell - you could have believed in Santa when you were 5! The only reason you stopped believing (hopefully) is that Santa doing his thing on Christmas is just a ridiculous idea. There's plenty of Santas that aren't as ridiculous, but no less fictitious.
This is good the hear, @rycolligan. This is all part of a long process of making male-dominated fields truly accessible to women. Especially now, with so many women entering STEM fields.
@ Honestly it wasn’t so bad, you just have to engage your willingness to re-evaluate your stance on something, but it always troubles me when I try to and I’m confronted with just how much psychological resistance and inertia my brain will generate.
I’ll give you a hint about part of why Feynman bros think so highly about Feynman despite his book making him look like an asshole, and it’s not just because they are sexist and like what he did (even though that probably is part of it): they probably have never read those books.
People who quote books about someone like this and idolize them very rarely actually read the book. Maybe some do, but the vast majority probably have only read selected quotes about the book, and people on the internets view of the book and the people it talks about, but they never have actually read the book. Just like how people who quote nietzsche and talk about nihilism have never actually read nietzsche and don’t really understand nietzsche. My guess is the same is true here. They only know about Feynman about quotes and other internet people talking about the books about Feynman who themselves have probably also never actually read the books (and on top of that they’re not even books by him as you said).
Hey Angela, I just wanted to say that your assessment of Anthony Zee based on the introduction to QED is 100% spot-on. I went to UC Santa Barbara for my undergraduate degree and he's one of the most hated professors in the entire department. Most students despise him for what he stands for. He's super misogynistic and out of touch and also clearly embodies everything else the "Feynman Bros" represent. He doesn't believe that women should be studying physics and he has been verbally disciplined by the department multiple times for saying so in class, yet no meaningful action has been taken against him to make sure he doesn't teach classes. According to some students I talked to, he would also get into fits of anger and occasionally throw erasers at people in class. Additionally, he would sneer at questions that he deemed "stupid" and wouldn't even try to answer most questions other than just repeating what he just said
TLDR you're absolutely right about him, and fuck Tony Zee.
sounds like a charmer, clearly he's logarithmically more fun than I am
Throwing erasers was classic discipline until quite recently. Like a few decades. Before Snowflakehood was granted to all. And it only worked where students were civil enough to not throw them back.
@@charlesspringer4709 Even if you agree with corporal punishment as a discipline tool (which I don't at all), using it on college students for asking questions is totally inappropriate either way. Zee doesn't teach lecture courses with 200 students, half of whom are asleep or not paying attention. He teaches upper-division elective classes with at most 40 students, all of whom are paying attention because they're interested in the subject (these are physics majors who chose to take the class). He wasn't throwing erasers as a disciplinary tool. He was throwing them because he's a jerk with anger issues
@@charlesspringer4709It only worked when there were few women around. If the price to pay to have more female physicists is a less toxic classroom, I'll take it.
@@charlesspringer4709 "snowflakehood?"
i don't think i've ever seen anyone as genuinely baffled as angela saying "YOU CAN JUST GO TO A STRIP CLUB" lol
For a while I thought you couldn't, but I think I was just confusing strip clubs with Mordor.
well she doesn't even get the "how do you exit from vi?" joke, so maybe some limitations in wit there
man: hehe I liek hot ladies
the field of physics: OMG HE'S SO QUIRKY 😆 HE'S SO WACKY 😆 HE'S SO MUCH NOBODY'S EVER BEEN THIS MUCH OMGGG THIS MAN IS THE WILDEST CRAZIEST CHARACTER ONLY A GENIUS COULD BE THIS WILD 😆 LOOK AT HIM HE'S KILLIN ME 😆😆😆
@@XatxiFly super nerd introverts seeing a man flirt in public: "holy shit this is the coolest man alive"
Remember - the girls don't really think you're the cutest funniest guy they've ever met.
"A Swede came up to me, big strong guy, tears in eyes, and said 'Sir, your accent is so beautiful, but I must not know your dialect.'"
-Richard P. Feynman
His accent was the best, the most beautiful accent. People often complement him on that accent, people who know a lot about accents. They're all talking about it.
That Swede's name? Alfred Nobel.
omg this reads like a trump quote
@@cosmiccabbage4458 I assumed it was Frank Stallone.
I'd like to think that Feynman relayed that story with a winking sarcasm or that Leighton recorded it with dramatic irony, but nothing in what we know of either man suggests they possessed any degree of self-awareness.
45:00 “is this a good time? should I bust out of the wallpaper?”
Incredible video, thank you for making this
In undergrad physics programs, nobody shuts up about Feynman. Including the professors.
Then you find that one black and white vid of young Feynman talking about guessing and checking against experiment, and it's pretty charming. And you're a physics undergrad so that's pretty refreshing and your family keeps asking you about the last episode of Big Bang Theory and Michio Kaku and you need better heroes.
But then you encounter him talking about the first time he realized "the female mind" can understand calculus because he alleged to overhear some knitting talk analogous to the concept of slope.
And you should squirm uncomfortably, and that should be the end. But...I don't really know how to end this.
Thank you Angela Collier, great channel.
Kaku is so freaking annoying and full of himself, almost as much as Avi Loeb. lol
Product of his era. You can nitpick using modern moral lenses and you’ll find something to hate every historical figure about. Just like us now, you think we won’t be judged for eating meat when they can make it in a lab in 200 years?
The thing to realise is the future will look negatively on you too for stuff you've done and said. You only have to see how statements of simple fact are treated as bigotry today to know that however much you imagine you haven't committed any thought crimes, and to consider that, unlikely the past, we all say a lot more that is recorded - we have quotes for everyone now, billions of them every day. In the future you are going to be that bad person who makes people squirm uncomfortably. Everyone is.
His pedagogical skills are also vastly overrated. I have never heard of a university using the Feynman Lectures as a textbook and, IIRC, the students who took his classes failed at an *extremely high rate.*
In all fairness, Isaac Newton probably also didn't think "the female mind" could understand calculus. People who lived 50+ years ago generally had some really strange ideas compared to today, and in 50 more years people will think we're just as strange.
the bongo drum transitions are killing me
They're so good 😂.
😂 a little funnier every time 😂
He plays like Andy Kaufman.
Feynman playing 😂
I'm deep in girltok and one of the videos that crosses my feed was "never trust a man who's good at the bongo drums", and now I know why. 🫡
Extremely insightful and eminently listenable. Fun fact Angela: I was actually in the audience for the daughter's speech and the hologram presentation.
I was just about to look up your videos... didn't expect to be greeted by your presence here of all places.
Heya Kyle - as a science educator yourself, what do you think of Feynman's legacy from that perspective? Is it a also a sham?
It would be cool to hear your story with a bit of a retrospective in light of everything and a shout out to this video.
If it isn't the B-team here to bow before the queen! 😛
Fun to see you here
Thank god for Angela Collier
The Ghost Writing bombshell is AMAZING. I have a friend who’s a ghostwriter, and the people who commission her genuinely think of themselves as having written the book. They think of her as a keyboard that they are typing on. It’s like those insufferable people who call AI image generators a tool, and that they are the real genius artist for coming up with the prompt. It’s astounding.
"Ghost writing"? The contents of "Surely you're joking, Mr. Fineman" are transcripts of audio recordings. If you believe Professors don't "write" their speeches, lectures, commencement addresses..., and can't tell the difference between an "editor" (Leighton) and an "author" (Feynman), you never worked in academia, or you are Angela Collier.
What's the bombshell? I don't want to listen to this whole thing to get it. "Surely You're Joking" contains anecdotes told to Ralph Leighton, and turned into print by him. The Feynman Lectures are lectures actually given by Feynman, recorded, and put into print form by somebody (Leighton and Sands, I suppose). Is that all? Doesn't everybody know that? Is that supposed to be scandalous?
I've not ghost written but I've been close-ish to someone who was going through the process of documenting their memoirs and having someone help write it all out. I wouldn't say that he wasn't 'directing' or 'authoring' that effort, but it certainly wouldn't be him doing the writing and I would hope he's not listed as the sole author.
Im not saying being an "ai" artist is like bejng actual master painter, but, even that is leagues ahead of being someone that confuses having a ghost writer with being the author themselves
@@maxw565 The videos and audio recordings that were transcribed for the book are publicly available. Somehow, one year of reseach was not enough for Angela Collier to provide any examples where the editor Ralph Leighton changed the text significantly, or at all. Three hours was not enough to tell us which passages she re-tells (instead of shows/reads) were removed by the authors' [sic] request before she was born? Or to show us any of the countless misogynistic and sexist passages that allegedly remained in the book, on screen?
Keeping the Swedish Chef audio rolling over the explanation was such a good editing choice.
I met Mr Feynman in Zambia, or as it was known then, Northern Rhodesia. He convinced me he was Bantu African. I wasn't aware of his celebrity at the time, He told me his name was Dick. I said, "you got that right".
I'll say more when my ghostwriter is finished.
everyone's got a problem with a guy having a good time
@@citricdemon that's what gavrilo princip said
Wtf, this whole comment thread sounds like sophisticated gibberish
@@timothywtillman4423 this is the funniest comment I`ve seen in all week lol
@@theimaginator7232 i hope your week improves
similarly to you, I was told about Feynman as a child interested in physics. I was obsessed with "surley you're joking". I read it over and over again as a girl, I'm not too sure why ten year old me was so fascinated by it. over a decade later I picked the book up when I was moving out, had a bit of reading and was shocked by the misogyny in the book. as someone who used to admire Feynman and grew out of it, this was a video that hit very close to home. thank you for this, it was fascinating and clearly thoroughly researched and written.
Any other flaws apart from misogyny
Feynman doesnt strike me as misogynistic at all
@@goyonman9655 he did seem a bit sus when I read the book and I'm far from being a third wave feminist
This is, by a wide margin, the best 3-hour analysis of Richard Feynman I have ever seen. Thank you. Have you considered writing a book? There's bound to be a big market for it, especially with Feynman's name on the cover and a big picture of him being good-looking and quirky. Please consider this, the world is starving for more Feynman books.
Isn’t UA-cam commentary the new book?
@@jonathanlink2071 Someone really should, if they haven't already, do word counts on long-form YT commentary like these and compare it to non-fiction books pre-smartphone era. The last non-fiction audiobook I listened to was ~7h30m but I wonder how much of that, assuming it's the average, is just from vocal performance differences.
@@hoodedferret According to youtube's vaguely-okay transcription and 'wc', this video is just shy of 29317 words. According to several sources, the average non-fiction book is in the ballpark of 50k words, though some sites claim that recently the word counts of NYT Bestsellers (including non-fiction) are trending shorter.
So, yeah, an editor and fleshing out things a bit could easily turn this video's script into a non-fiction takedown, but as you can see in the desc there's already a few like this. (I'd buy one by Angela, anyway, because getting this sort of thing to the top of the bestseller list is a net positive, culture war be damned.)
The Sham Legacy of Richard Feynman, written by Richard Feynman.
@@Blox117 me when I don't understand that the legacy of one of the most famous physicists has a huge influence on the state of physics
Dr. Angela's war stories are absolutely terrifying. Brutal.
Absolutely NOT.
Almost all of which have NOTHING to do with Feynman.
She blames Feynman for the fact that he's admired by assholes just as much as normal, polite people.
Which makes HER as much, or more, of an asshole as what she's trying to insinuate Feynman to have been.
Seems every woman who went through academia went through the trenches
Absolutely every woman, and lots of men too.
@@akulkisDid you…watch the whole video?
the twitter account larping as Feynman is an incredible piece of foreshadowing
foreshadowing is indeed a literary device
As a competitive misogynist I also hate casual misogynists.
This is why I stopped being a misogynist, too many sweats
It'll never not baffle me how underappreciated Maxwell's work appears to be in the public's eye.
And sometimes when there is a list of the "most important physicists" and the name does come up, it's near the end.
Touché!
I'd put Gibbs in that list too
I'd put Boltzmann
@@maksimyasko2092
Yes, indeed. Boltzmann was seminal in making the concept of atoms central to physics in the 20th century (which was the century of quantum theory, atomic and nuclear science, radars, transistors, lasers, optical fibers, information age).
@@jamesleishman8025
The triumph of vector algebra over quaternion algebra, Grassmannian algebra (and Clifford algebra) led to Physics' fragmentation into numerous mathematical fiefdoms ruled by the various flavors of higher mathematics with their disparate notations instead of the universal geometric algebra originally envisioned by Leibniz.
Higher Mathematics became the stumbling block for most people to be able to understand and do physics and hindered the unification of Physics for at least one century.
No, Gibbs shouldn't be honored because of his being a culprit in the travesty.
As a mathematician I feel like I need to make a parallel video on Erdos
Wait, what?
As a fellow (kind of former) mathematician, I would definitely be interested to see such a video!
Can you speak more about this? It sounds intriguing. I feel von Neumann is similar too, an undoubtedly brilliant individual whose true reality is unlikely to match how his fabled ability is talked about. Anecdotes and stories on the verge of tall tales.
@@lucidjar side note but i think von Neumann truly was the greatest evil genius that humanity has had to offer so far. dude majorly contributed to the Manhattan project and alongwith groves wanted to bomb kyoto which had a population of 3 mil in 45 which was higher than the combined population of hiroshima & nagasaki. he personally did all the calculations to evaluate the damage and death the blast would cause and listed it as a major candidate cos it was the cultural capital of Japan for 11 centuries and they thought bombing it would cause the most psychological trauma. dude was a staunch Anti communist and worked closely with the DOD his entire life. His intellectual accomplishments in physics, math, computer science etc is also absolutely unparalleled and can only be best described as genius. i should also mention that it was secretary of war stimson who while still complicit in the bombings, got kyoto removed as a candidate cos he was horrified by the prospect of bombing kyoto specifically, partly because he was there for his honeymoon & understood that the city had immense cultural value for the japanese people.
@@lucidjar Erdos has a reputation of being eccentric, kind of like Feynman. I'm less familiar with von Neumann, but the stories that I've heard of him were just about how smart he was.
Edit: I haven't watched the video yet, but people seem to be talking about misogyny. Again, I don't think I've heard anything specific about von Neumann. However, Erdos apparently had a quirky vocabulary where, for example, he called children "epsilon" and a mathematical lecture a "sermon". He also said that married men were "slaves", and divorced men were "liberated".
There are some great quotes from Gell-Mann about how Feynman is famous because Feynman wanted to be famous.
Gellman just copied Cartan, Feynmann created new and decisive points of view
On the other hand, Cartan was worth copying. On the gripping hand, so was Feynman.
Matt...Matt Colville???? I feel like I shouldn't be surprised to see you in the comments, but also I was not expecting to see one of the DnD youtubers I follow randomly comment on a 2+ hour physics video.
Doesn't it make it kinda sad most people know him through this book of anecdotes?
Lmao I didnt believe you until I clicked it. @gravitydust6092
This contextualizes so much for me.
I had a Feynman book thrust at me when I was 10 or 12. Fortunately it wasn’t Surely You’re Joking, it was The Meaning of It All, but I do recall being a bit disappointed at the time that the book was compiled from lectures rather than written by Feynman, and also that it didn’t really have any science in it. As you say, it was given to me because an older relative thought that, as a “young man who is interested in science,” it was something that I ought to read. I must have encountered Feynman diagrams at some point in college, but physics isn’t my field, I work in Aerospace. Feynman’s actual scientific work has always felt kind of abstract to me (I realize that this may not be a unique complaint).
Early in my career I did encounter the appendix Feynman wrote for the Rogers Commission report (appendix F, appropriately), and I was impressed by some of the observations he made, especially relating to the disconnect between engineering and management on probability of mission failure. A lot of that didn’t necessarily require a world class physicist, it’s a human problem and not a physics problem or a math problem. It needed an outsider who had access and who didn’t hold any particular reverence for the organizational hierarchy of NASA.
I never looked into the stories that much, although I was generally aware that he was a bit of self-aggrandizing bullshitter. The accounts of faking foreign languages, which I’d read about, line up with that. I always suspected that some of the stories, like the painter story, were intended more as parables than as true accounts.
This video really fits all those jagged pieces of Feynman that I’d come across over the years together into a whole that makes sense to me. I didn’t know about Ralph Leighton, or that Feynman didn’t actually write any of the Feynman books. I didn’t know about the domestic violence with his second wife either. The conjecture that some of his behavior and casual sexism may have been due to insecurities about his masculinity tracks as reasonable to me, although I guess it’s not possible to confirm the inner thoughts of a man who’s been dead thirty some years.
I didn’t plan to get sucked into a three hour video about Richard Feynman. I clicked on it because I feel a morbid fascination with any takedown or attempted takedown of a revered public figure. I expected to only watch five or ten minutes of it, but there’s a lot more here than just “that guy that everyone likes is secretly a huge asshole.” This really was a journey. I enjoyed watching it. I feel like something that I’d always found confusing and sort of difficult to reconcile makes a bit more sense to me now. I’ll definitely think differently about Feynman from now on.
Today I learned I've read every book Richard Feynman ever wrote.
As a U.S. citizen I have been musing recently on how absolutely detrimental cult of personality can be. This video looks like it's going to be a somewhat painful watch (I enjoy the surface level Feynman mythos), but I have a feeling I'll be in a better place on the other side of it. I give you thanks!
I agree, i just think his books and things are fun. It didn't take very many chapters for it to become obvious that many stories are heartily extended for gaffs, goofs, and the occasional philosophy. I think it would be crazy to believe everything he ever wrote lmao.
But apart from the personality i do still idolize his contributions to theoretical physics. The path integral, quantum electrodynamics, even just down to the integral trick he popularized. I remember him centrally for his ability to communicate physics very very well, his intelligence and contributions to the field, and his warm personality.
But we all must know the tragedies of the world these days, so i will proceed to watch this video and hope it's at least unbiased. I trust Angela though
Her most painful videos tend to be the most insightful.
Same. It stings but it's the whole truth. Or at least more of it.
Noble prize winner, participant of Manhattan Project, Challanger accident investigatior. And you compare him to living definiton of fraud and hype?
Most of people are subject to cult of personality no matter where they are. North Korea had 1 cult of personality but in the U.S you have multiple
If Einstein said that Maxwell should come before him on the list, we should believe Einstein.
“… on the shoulders of Maxwell” ✅
I'm sure it's at least partially a function of the era he worked during, but I also have never heard a single word negative about Maxwell-not that he was abusive towards his spouse or had inappropriate relations with a student or blood relative, not that he was a eugenicist or anti-suffrage, not even that he undermined a rival's career.
I misread Einstein as eminem for a sec and I was like “yo what is eminem on about”
@@GSBarlev I've heard some comments on one channel on 'stealth tech' that outright says Maxwell was not very nice to people not as smart as he was, and he almost always considered himself the smartest person in the room ..., smartest in all objective probability, but not someone with a good sense of humanity ...
I'm just imagining Einstein and Maxwell in a big trench coat trying to get into the movies.
Probably all great physicists would give similar credit to previous work they built on. Except Euler.
"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Was this how mormonism and other religions started? Some vulnerable dude simping for another dude's tall tales and deifying him and us the flock not bothering to question things?
Oh lord it's a symbio-parasitic? Mental illness! I dont feel like calling it Codependent
The simps are usually called apostles or companions, but yeah.
My graduate advisor did his post-doc at Caltech back in the day when you used overhead projectors during your talk. You would project your transparencies on the wall behind you, moving a sheet of paper to block the text until you were ready to show it. He told me this story.
During seminars Feynman used to have a bad habit of allowing the speaker to do all of the math and then shouting out the answer before the speaker revealed it. He did this one time and the speaker then moved the paper to reveal "I knew that damn Feynman was going to yell out the answer!"
I had to put up with that in lectures also. It was imensely irritating. "No, you cant read on and see how it fits together; you have to wait until I reveal the next line to you". The thing is,
Reading the end - to see where they are going - is immensely
Helpful. Just giving
A few words at a time is immensely annoying and meant I spent my time being so annoyed by their game-playing that it seriously detracted from me being able to focus on what they were saying. Just put up the whole page, and then talk though it, line by line. If I lose track, I can then look forward to see where they are going, which will put the earlier stuff in context.
Of course I also had a fourth semester calculus professor who was doing a complex pole integration and after about 15 minutes of writing everything out was on the verge of scribbling the answer when one of my classmates yelled out same. I remember him just turning to the student and yelling "You d*ck!"
The tip in the water cup thing is a great example of how you can judge people based on how they treat service industry workers.
I’ve ghosted people after a date because they tipped poorly/treated the server like trash.
@@DioJeans Date a lot of Jews, do you?
I kinda floated through "Surely You're Joking!" when I read it 10 years ago and was overall charmed by it. That one stuck out as him just being a, well, dick.
On the other hand it's funny how smart and quirky mr Feynman doesn't realise a serious risk of getting spit in his coffe the next time.
@@DioJeans I have too, bc this is both a) good red-flag identification and self-preservation; and b) the morally correct reaction. There is no truer indicator of capacity-for-empathy than treatment of menial service workers.
Percussionist here: I found your video in my recommendations. Watching in parts, so I only made it to 38:03 and I don’t know if you address his musicianship, but I just wanted to say that his tone on the bongos is shit. Sounds like a cardboard box.
I think it’s from the play
@@calliope7479 could be. I found some clips of him playing and the bongos are not tuned either so that play got that detail right
If you're into science and want to try getting deeper than most videos, this channel is great! That's all personal preference, though. For me, I just know that I can't watch when I'm in a mood/mode where I have to rewind if I start getting lost.
Also, while I'm not a musician by any means, I did find the bongos and chanting annoying. (Not Angela's fault, mind you. And it was funny, at least.)
On percussion, recently, I got sucked into a video series where a company that makes music learning material gets professional musicians in to challenge them. My favorite so far is the Jazz percussionist/professor who had to come up with percussion for a Nirvana song with the percussion removed. And then for the follow-up, he brought his band and they workshopped and improvised a multi-style re-interpretation of another Nirvana classic. I know nothing about the brand behind the channel/channels, since I'm not in the market, but that's probably my ideal brand content.
I think his music is better than his lectures.
@@ciprianpopa1503 Maybe, but either way the bar is in hell.
I clicked on this video and immediately thought 'there's just no way I'm going to watch a nearly 3hr+ video on Feynman from some rando' but that's exactly what I did, and I'm the better for watching it! Really fascinating insight, very funny at times, awfully cringe at other times, thank you so much for such a great vid!
Coming from theoretical particle physics, I'm continuously surprised how little of Feynman's physics is actually relevant. The part of Feynman's work that he did that I've ever used is QED and Feynman variables. Feynman variables are an integration technique, sort of like u-substitutions but more complicated. QED would be quite significant, but he's extremely lucky to have gotten credit for that. Frank CLose in "The Infinity Puzzle" discusses a lot of this history, but Schwinger had completely finished QED and presented it over two days at a conference. Feynman was almost completely forgotten at that conference, and the most notable thing about his presentation was how bad it was. All he had were a bunch of Stueckelberg diagrams (they had yet to be renamed after Feynman), couldn't explain any of the math, had no conceptual explanations of anything he was talking about, and no concrete results from his work to indicate that he had really done something. Dirac asked him a question which may not have been adequately answered (hard to tell with Dirac -- he simply moved back to the wall he had been standing at). Bohr got so annoyed with Feynman being unable to answer his question, that he went up to the stage, took the chalk out of Feynman's hand, and began lecturing Feynman on basic quantum mechanics. Feynman, in interviews and probably his dictated 'writings', is quite upfront with trying to create a facade for himself and a mythos around him and was happy to play politics to that end... which is exactly what you need to do with the Nobel committee in order to win the prize. Partons? Bjorken, who recently died this past year, worked out the quart model based on Gell-Mann's Eightfold Way (Gell-Mann actually never thought quarks were real and, being an asshole himself, had no problem yelling at people for being morons for thinking quarks existed... right up until they were discovered). The parton model was a competing model that didn't explain the data while Bjorken did, was used to explain the data, and was the theoretical model that SLAC was trying to validate and the only reason anyone thought it was worth searching for quarks.
Even with the Challenger disaster, it wasn't just the General that Sally Ride had talked to. Multiple people had figured it out (possibly only because of Sally Ride's initial tip, it's not clear on how many groups may have been involved behind the scenes) but for various political reasons, didn't want to be the person to present the information and wanted the independent scientist to be the person. So, Feynman had multiple people asking him questions about the weather, and material properties, and o-rings. And it wasn't until one of the other committee members had him over for dinner, and then, after dinner, brought him into his garage and showed him an o-ring and a glass of ice water. It was only then did he put it all together. In retrospect he realized that he was only there to be the guy to present what everyone already knew and that everyone was leading him by the nose while he thought he was being some trailblazing, iconoclastic, maverick doing whatever he wanted. He's talked about this explicitly, and I don't understand how people listen to this and think he was the trailblazing, iconoclastic, maverick.
Female Feynman Bros do exist (I usually refer them to Feynman cultists, and the Bros may be a subset of that). Probably the first time I realized something was wrong with the mythology was a conversation I had with two grads during my undergrad. One of them had gone to a university down in Southern California for his undergrad (not Caltech, one of the UCs though I don't remember which one) and one of the professors there was an emeritus professor who professor who apparently spent her time just hanging out around the department (now that she was emeritus) and saying things like, "Feynman gave me all the physics that I could swallow". The other grad worked with my advisor and she said absolutely nothing during either that exchange or as I tried to explain to the first grad how disturbing and inappropriate all of this was. I think about this exchange a lot...
The second time I realized things were rotten with the cult (that there was a cult) was when I finally looked up whole 'bongo drums caused his second wife to divorce him'. I'm really glad that got included in this video (I had written out the explanation about an hour before). The legend always sat weird with me because how do you marry someone like Feynman and not know, at least, that he would be thinking about math a lot of the time and also hate him for doing math? Finally looking up the divorce papers (thanks FBI surveillance and FOIA?) and seeing the actual reason -- violent rages -- that gets let out of the legend was eye opening. She wasn't some fun-hating idiot who couldn't appreciate math, but rightfully fearful for her life and needed to escape a psycho.
The cult of Feynman needs to die.
Can I get a source for the dirac anecdote and the fbi files? Id like to dig into those
@@wubanizer The Dirac anecdote comes from "The Infinity Puzzle" by Frank Close, and he includes citations in the book. The FBI files are searchable -- Angela showed the relevant ones on screen; it's been well over a decade since I looked them up, and don't remember how off hand, so your googling would be quicker than waiting for me to do it. I don't have a source off hand for the surveillance specifically but it's fairly well known that everyone involved in the Manhattan program was being tracked by the FBI following the war. This was especially true for anyone with communist sympathies, which the FBI kinda of assumed out of hand regardless, but they were suspicious of Feynman (iirc his second wife told them she thought he was a socialist, but they decided, if he was, he wasn't much of a threat).
@@orthochronicity6428 I'm reading David Bohms biography right now and he got caught in that socialist hunting too. Actually he ended up exiled in Brazil for a time. Thanks for your thoughtful response, I appreciate it.
Very insightful, thanks for the write-up
Using your personality and fame to take advantage of impressionable university students is messed up (evil in fact), especially if you are in a position authority. Such a person should not be lauded and held up as a hero, because this then tells young men that this sort of behaviour is acceptable...
I'm reminded of George Carlin talking about not having anything against Jesus, but loathing his fan club.
Good to see someone still remembers George Carlin 🥲
@@dokchampa9324Well compare real human to fictional character is not fair though.
@@dokchampa9324
It is difficult to maintain scientific rigour and ascribe the acts or quotes of NT-Jesus to the historical Jesus
@@dokchampa9324 That's not really 100% proven and even if he was real he was nothing like he's decribed so it really doesn't matter too much.
my fav quote from George Carlin was "why should anyone be proud of what they were born as" they didn't accomplish anything being borna certain way
My grandfather was a physicist and met Feynman a couple times. He said he was insufferable.
Yes. He was. Being an enfant terrible was part of his value.
@@terrycole472 "value" or part of his contrived schtick?
@@feynmanschwingere_mc2270 : The leaders of the Manhattan project theoretical division (Bethe et al.) valued it because he ignored their elevated status and told them exactly what he thought. And whatever else it may have been, his "schtick" was not "contrived". I'm satisfied it bubbled from a real creative spirit. You are welcome to disagree.
@@terrycole472 i think the video you're commenting under disagrees but I just watched the thing
Found the book "Surely you're joking..." randomly in my library a few weeks ago and picked it up as I had heard of Feynman and my dad is a phycisist. I could not finish it because I found it to be a long series of humble bragging about how smart he is/was. Interesting that I should stuble upon this video right after. You add a lot of great points not least from a female perspective on his actions. In Denmark where I am from we have Niels Bohr and I think its fair to say we have our own cult of personality around him. You get religion when God has left the building.
So he was not joking ? 😂
A contextual note about Feynman's reported domestic abuse: Married partners couldn't divorce without proof of domestic violence or infidelity, and so spouses who otherwise respected each other would conspire to convince a judge of one or the other so they could part ways. In the 3 years that my mother worked in a hospital lab, 2 of her friends there saved up money to hire private investigators with their husbands to "discover" their husbands with sex workers posing as lovers. Seeing this in the paper likely wouldn't set off too many alarm bells due it being a known divorce tactic.
i wonder if that's a part of why so many people don't believe women's sexual assault etc. claims in the modern day.
Yes, and also note that the legal standard at the time was often "EXTREME cruelty." Yes, legally at the time you could be "normally cruel" to your wife, but for a judge to sign off on a fault divorce, it generally required an allegation of extreme cruelty. Temper tantrums wouldn't be enough. In cases where some sort of other grounds couldn't be proven (like infidelity or abandonment), assertions of domestic violence were common. None of this is to say it couldn't have happened with Feynman, but when it's the outlier allegation for the "real Feynman" Angela uncovers amidst his other apparently kind and loving behavior toward his wives, children, and other women in his life, it should at least be given some pause before accepted uncritically as "proof," especially given divorce standards of the time.
@@BobJones-rs1sd Agreed, this is such an extreme outlier that "divorce tactic" sounds more plausible.
Yes. I knew this about divorce law and was sure the story was heading towards him having lied about something to help her get the divorce (I figured lying to get a divorce was something the FBI was investigating to pin on him along with talking to the Soviets). But I guess we'll never know if it was a true act by a violently abusive man or a lie to enable a mutually desired divorce.
@@TheProgressiveMichigander
Almost 3 hours long? the jenny nicholsonfication of physics videos has been completed. we are eating good today.
Jenny what?
All Dr. Angela needs is a cute hat & themed plushy. I'm here for it.
we'd better eat good, it's Thanksgiving
@@dreamofsprings A different channel but not about physics.
The costumes are still under development, but they'll be here...
I was one of those kids who got Feynman's books shoved into his face as a teenager. But to me there was another aspect to this myth. Since I was in a third world country across the world from California, it was to me a distant land of legends with physics titans who invented the portable sun. So in that way it was much harder for me to break free of the legend.
That explains why there are still so many Indian Elon Musk fans after the Western Elon Musk fans became disillusioned.
@@H._sapiens stop bringing us indians into everything, yal are so obsessed
same here :) though turkey isn't a third world country
@@weirdfishes63 it really is
Just imagine Marie Curie admitting to be a nymphomaniac (the female version of a philanderer). Would she be as popular as Feynman?
A few minutes in and i learn that Feynman was a misogynist and Schroedinger was a WHAT DID YOU SAY
Horndog.
A cat. Schrodinger was a cat.
Right? I didn't know that before either. I googled it and yeah, unfortunately he was.
If it makes you feel better, right up until you learned that he both was and wasn't.
Schroedinger’s age of consent.
The fact that you felt the need to overexplain why creeps and belligerent men made the experience of studying unreasonably unpleasant for you expecting to be dismissed is galling in itself
And even worse, those sorts of "men" are in the comments doing just what you think they would do.
@@z0uLess Case in point! Please re-read the comments above until you get it.
@@jakobwachter5181 This kind of faux-zinger is all over comment sections with the person who drops it feeling like they've really said something clever. Haha! You got em!
@@z0uLess We're not talking about _men_ though, we are talking about a very specific kind of men. Creepy men. So, are you creepy? Or did you just misread the topic of conversation and it isn't actually about you?
@@z0uLess I mean she gave some pretty good examples in the video. Getting up just to sit right next to a woman you don't know to drop your pencil as an excuse to touch her leg. Following a woman home and banging on her door for an hour. Pretty standard creepy behaviour. Do you understand how that's creepy?
Anyway if you study sociology I feel like you should understand the difference between "some friction" and systemic misogyny. But as somebody in a happy same-sex relationship, I also don't see how this kind of friction is necessary for love.
We have a version of these guys in philosophy too. Usually they've read one book from one of the "edgy" philosophers like Nietzsche, not understood it, but still retained the confidence that they are the smartest person in the entire faculty and will prattle on during lectures, while the lecturers try to give them not so subtle hints that they're talking out of their ass.
Usually they drop out after 1 or 2 semesters, but some of them graduate and never grow out of it.
And some go on to become politicians. Where they get to weaponize their condescension and take revenge on academics by defunding it.
Never trust a philosopher who never, in his entire life, travelled more than 5 miles from his place of birth.
Unlike Nietzsche and most other philosophers, Feynman actually had a list of very difficult accomplishments, each of which only a handful of men on the entire planet could have accomplished.
@akulkis Hey Kants is one of the greatest.
@@akulkisthis comment reeks of STEM elitism homie
@akulkis You have no idea how utterly brilliant philosophers are, especially our giants. Oh, so f y I, you're very scientific disciplines is birth out of natural philosophy. And that's not even going into the epistemological biases of scientists.
Hello! I put this video on my "watch later" because when I saw it come up on my recommended, I was like, "oh, an exposé on one of my idols, I need to really sit down for this." Luckily, I'm not too attached to Feynman and I didn't like Feynman based on any kind of educated understanding of him or his work, I just thought some of his quotes were funny.
I wanted to write something because immediately, right off the bat, around the 10:00-12:00 minute mark, you're talking about your undergraduate experience with "Feynman bros", and I have never felt more seen. Not because I am one, but because I'm absolutely surrounded by them, and I've felt so lonely and frustrated my entire undergraduate experience. And I'm a white man, too. I can't imagine how much worse these self-important dudes are when on top of having a God complex, they also don't respect you because of your gender or race.
All of your stories, everything you said, I have such similar stories (except for ones where you were discriminated against because you're a woman, of course). I was at a booth at the start of the school year pitching Physics Club to those who walked by, and we were outside, and there was a guy hanging out that was telling us he was a Freshman just starting at my our university. He told my buddies and I that he was an astrophysics major. We don't have an astrophysics, just a physics major, astronomy minor. We had a solar telescope set up, like a nice one, a Coronado, and we told him to look through it because the sun was really active that day. He was like, "ehh, I have my own solar telescope, I'm okay." And my buddies and I were shocked, like "wow, you have your own Coronado?" and he explained that he didn't but he had his own scope with a solar filter. And sometime in this last semester, I heard the same guy in the halls (of the physics building) talking about his theories to someone else. I mean, maybe he wasn't literally talking about his theories, but I think when I say "his theories" you understand the kind of speech this guy was giving. That's probably the most Feynman bro kind of guy I've met. I think he tells everyone in his life that he's an astrophysics major and didn't want to be involved with people that would challenge himself intellectually, hence why he never got involved with Physics Club.
I remember during an astronomy lab, the entire lab was to notice patterns and play around with Stellarium. Most of our lab group was working off of Stellarium on the school computer since it had multiple monitors and we could all see, but this one dude was like "oh, I've used Stellarium before", pulled out his own laptop, and did the lab alone, separate from us. For labs in higher level courses, I would always tell my group that I was the spreadsheet guy. I make nice spreadsheets, and I've learned that most of my peers are very grabby, and they want to do everything themselves. So I'd sit back and wait for them to tell me numbers. Most of the lab, I'd sit around while they argue over the setup and argue over the results, all while being grabby, just moving things, doing things, not getting data. Very frustrating.
Worst of all, I was so lonely my sophomore year of undergrad (I'm a senior now, pray for me) that I asked the only physics major who ever made an attempt to reach out to me to be my roommate for the upcoming semester since he'd mentioned his lease was expiring. He seemed a little pretentious, but I really just wanted someone who wasn't going to party or hotbox the apartment, so I figured it would be fine.
This guy I'm living with, he's not a Feynman bro because he doesn't really know Feynman and his attitude and whatever, but he's lived and breathed Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene his whole life, and he feels the compulsion to tell me about the Dark Forest Hypothesis and extraterrestrial life every time I walk through the apartment door, always describing things as a "cosmic symphony" and describing existence as "pygmyish unimportance". I am the least serious person I've ever met, and I speak in jokes 24/7, and to me, that means pretending to be the dumbest person in the room. I. Can't. Stand. This. Guy. We're applying to graduate schools now and his essays are all about his passion for physics, about how he got a telescope at age 13, and about how the burning questions of the universe keep him up at night. And the way that he just talks at me, I've never met anybody who talks so much. I'm a quiet guy, I've always been, and so I've always been a good listener. I've never met anybody before who *abuses* that. I never leave my room because I will get talked at. To prove to my friends that I'm not exaggerating, I've run a voice recorder before, and I have 30 minute long recordings where I do not speak. I leave my room to cook or eat, and he will talk to me the entire time telling me about, for a lack of a better phrase, his theories.
Sorry for the ranting, but I hope that maybe other people can appreciate hearing these stories. Watching this video made me feel a lot less lonely. I think there's a plague in academia. My generation grew up on Neil deGrasse Tyson and I think a lot of kids wanted the image of being smart. Honestly, that's why I first got into physics. I wanted to feel smart. I think a lot of people in academia, though, didn't grow out of it. I've heard many, many people my own age tell me that they have always wanted to go into physics for some really grandiose reasons, phrased with Neil deGrasse Tyson vernacular.
I don't know. I don't know the solution, but it's made it really hard to be in academia as a student. I'm terrified that my colleagues in graduate school or in a career are going to be the same. Unchecked egos, tying masculinity into intellectualism. It's exhausting. I'm such a (self diagnosed) fun goofy guy and I've made nearly no friends in undergrad, and the few people I have decided to befriend exhaust me. Always talking over one another. Always trying to dominate the conversations, "informing" other people of things they've read. I noticed nearly everyone in my life will end their phrases and thoughts with "um..." or always be trailing off so that nobody can interrupt.
If it's not obvious, I've lost my mind a little in the past 3-4 years. Thank you for the video, I see you talk about this stuff more on the rest of your channel, thank you for being a voice about this kind of stuff!
hello, undergrad physics student here. reading your comment made me feel less lonely. i don't exactly know what i was expecting when i applied to study physics but that definitely wasn't it...i really, really just wanted to learn physics. i thought we'll be just bunch of confused but curious people who'll study physics. that's all. but ever since i entered that classroom, i feel like i've joined a war- not exaggerating, a literal war of people who are trying to outshine each other constantly. questions about things i didn't know, theories i never heard of...i felt stupid and clueless. i saw no shame in asking questions or being curious before but now i think twice or often thrice before asking something- is it stupid? will i appear stupid? i don't know. i was so excited, i was trying to learn about everything with questions. i've never been good at appearing as a cool person. i was never normal about anything i enjoy- i am the opposite of nonchalant. i always had to study very much to learn. it took me quite some time to grasp a new concept. but these people are different. they seem cool and clever and- i don't know. it's quite awful and lonely often times. i don't have the energy in me to strategize on how to appear as the smartest and how to make people feel small all the time. i don't get it. it's not because im a good, pure person or i love physics more than everyone. i really don't have the energy...it's so tiring. i try my best to keep enthusiastic but it's hard. idk.
also, i don't know much about Michia Kaku and Brian Greene stuff. what is it about them?
This feels like "Rich dad, poor dad: physics edition". I am sorry you had to read all this, but it was fascinating.
Poor Dad always said to keep my head down and deescalate a urinal fight. Rich Dad taught me you can cut a piss hole through your enemies, all for under minimum wage.
@@XatxiFly LMAOOOOOOOOO
Most self-help books are garbage.
Oh boy, we've arrived at the moment when the videos become very ambitious and the FOV gets wider
I hope that doesn't mean Angela starts uploading once every 11 months
In her hbomberguy era
@@djason338 she just skipped one week, chill mate ^^
I'm really liking this video and I need to pace it cause there's just so much perspective to gain on topics that don't seem to be on the radar of many people
This is Academy Award quality. Long-form UA-cam category. I watched the entire thing, in one setting, and remained captivated. Really great.
Go check out her video on sexual harassment in academia. It's about the second one she ever made
I do like "Feynman bro," but I'd like to suggest "Feyn-boy" because I think it's funny that the portmanteau kinda sounds like "fanboy" already.
thank God for @vivian.taylor
what about the Feynwomen?
@ what about the ROUSes?
Bonus: it replaces "man" with "boy".
feynboiii
Male here, I read Surely you're joking as a teenager.
Being the smartest guy in the room was sort of my whole personality in middle school, and the chemistry teacher was a "Feynman bro" as you call them.
I found this book online when looking for stuff by him that I could actually read, as I quickly gave on on the Lectures.
Reading that book as a 15-year-old, I was not able to recognize the entitlement and misogyny for what they were, and having no experience in bars/women/safe-cracking, all the anecdotes seemed plausible to me.
What I'm saying is I totally fell for the book. I became a more annoying 15-year-old, which wasn't the end of the world, and I acted very stupidly towards a girl in class that I liked, which I regret to this day.
Thank you for the video, knowing the context in which the stories were told and the way in which this old man's anecdotes were somehow written down for posterity to affect a guy on the other side of the globe somehow makes the whole thing more comedic. I hope as a society we can grow out of surely you're joking, as I can't imagine much good has come out of the book.
14:45 As an autistic person I can say you have touched on a real problem within the autistic community. Some genuinely treat their autism like an excuse to be inconsiderate to others.
Yep, is ther edeserved leeway, yes, but its more social phopars, not about trying to be respectful, thewr is no excuse to not trying to be respectful to people, at least generally ,
I find this is far more often applied by allistic people to excuse our behavior than by people who actually understand what autism is.
I imagine if it was possible to "cure" Autism, those people would still be assholes
It promotes ableism by infantilizing people with autism, or neurodivergent people more generally
I’m autistic (not a man, genderqueer AFAB) and I struggle with seeing this discourse sometimes because autism DOES make it more likely to be rude by accident. But after some thinking I see the difference- I’ve been accidentally inconsiderate to people in the past, but the difference is I feel embarrassed about it in retrospect even though it was an accident and try to be alert about it going forward.
Now there’s also nuance to be had about the culture of shame and self-hatred and hypervigilance among people like me and how it gets unhealthy sometimes (I have many clear memories of being laughed at for an innocuous faux pas and it caused severe social anxiety for years)- the "it's not an excuse" discourse can SOMETIMES verge on the ableist authority figure logic of "there's no such thing as being rude on accident, if you behave rudely to someone it always means you hate them and are doing it on purpose to hurt them", and we've got to be careful to stay out of there
But it IS definitely true that autism does NOT excuse these guys’ behaviour, even though autism makes it more likely to be rude by accident, because the thing with these guys is they aren’t even trying to consider in retrospect how their actions have affected others.
(There's an interesting conversation on this topic about how our society doesn't push boys to develop emotional awareness but this comment is already long enough)
8:55 Outstanding Angela, you’ve nailed it again. I’m 54 years old, I knew about Richard Feynman from being a precocious teen who read Scientific American instead of magazines about wrestling or sports cars, and it wasn’t acceptable then. We all knew that. It’s just that people were able to get away with boorish behavior as long as they were interesting and quirky in a way that could be lauded at dinner parties.
Yup, it's the New York City storyteller accent and other things.
Sometimes, they come off as being an unfiltered stovepipe, talking fast and loud, whatever comes to mind.
Sadly I think people like this can still get away with it...
@@hariseldon-d2paway with it? They become the most powerful people in the world. This is the bad place.
Schrödinger was way worse.
I went for engineering instead of physics, and our Feynman bros are the guys that think Elon Musk is the greatest genius of our time.
Same for computer science, lot of Musk fanboys here
Wait really? For me it was the opposite. Muskateers would accept no one besides the elongated Muskrat on their little altars to whorship.
thats gotta be way worse
@@LPVince94elongated muskrat lmao
@@cookiequeen5430 I *really* don't get it: I'm in CS and he's more than a little retarded in that he's not using Ada in his spaceships/cars/microcontrollers. If he were *half* as smart as his branding makes him out to be, he's be aware of the Ada/C cost-effectiveness report [old, but very interesting], and the new[er] SPARK proving system.
Something I really appreciate about this video is the nuanced image of Feynman it presents. We are tempted to think of people as being all good or all bad, but it’s clear he had both good qualities and bad ones. As much good as he did for physics, he did significant harm as well. I really like your measured, well-thought-out scripting and delivery on all of your videos, but I think it has a chance to shine here.
Only a sith deals in absolutes. Binary thinking is a cancer on our modern world, being able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time is a skill we should all strive to master. Feynman was important and a jerk. Weinstein helped produce good movies but was an abuser. Spacey was a good actor but also an abuser. Its so hard for people to be able to live in world where good people do bad things.
"As much good as he did for physics, he did significant harm as well." This too shall pass. It's absurd to think these are remotely in proportion.
I'm a 51 yo, relatively smart female, and I've always loved Richard Feynman. I first learned of him in a Physics Today magazine that I saw sitting in the science room in my high school. He had just passed away.
But I have always felt uncomfortable with his interactions with women. Unfortunately, you're not going to find many heroes in the past without giving them a waiver for chauvinism. It does make me very sad.
If you're asking what he's admired for, I thought it was pretty understood that he was admired for being able to explain physics to the layman. That's what he's famous for. Six Easy Pieces. His lectures are very funny and entertaining.
"We used to believe that the planets were moved by angels pushing them from behind, flapping their wings. As you will see, this theory has now been modified..."
He also gave some pretty solid social insights, such as stop bowing to men who wear fancy hats, like the Pope. I'm sure you can appreciate how rare it was to find outspoken atheist back in the day. Vanishingly rare.
Being an atheist is cringe
Your response has poetic style. Nice work. It reminded me of the days in high school trying to write a sonnet in English class. Could not make either organization work. Later learned that it would be 10 years before my brain would first fully developed. This was back in the day when they were still hitting kids with wooden boards.
Angela Collier PHD, IMPRESSIVE complex, without convolution, or a negative Eigen Vector, equation of the Feynman Effect.
F sub e is undefined in the real numbers, but in those systems invented by corrupted minds of mathematicians, using double imaginary numbers along the X axis and irrational numbers on the Y axis it possible to put all seminar attendees asleep! (As the great statistician Dr. Box PHD, said “ Mr Smith, you are a victim of your Calculus”. If he only knew what horror I saw in every attempt at calc 1,2,3, diffy Q, 1,2. I made it. Scarred for life. You are a great dual sport academic.
And if you wanted to be angry about the way women are treated today in physics, how about targeting the men who are their peers, who absolutely know better how to behave, instead of the guy who was born literally in 1918?
the speaker makes it quite clear she wouldn't have picked on Feynman if he didn't have such an immense cult of personality that directly influences her peers in the current day. multiple times actually.
You're not complaining too much, you're saying what we're all thinking. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for addressing the Feynman issue.
I wasn't thinking this I was thinking about hot dogs is this how you all live??
@@GypsumGenerationjump bro
@@IMS-4 :/
It's ironic that in all of Feynman's personal anecdotes, he presents himself as the very clever boy who outwits everyone else, but in his approach to popular physics, he does very little of that.
I came into physics surrounded by guys who spouted stuff about the twin paradox and wormholes and string theory and whatever that they got from Michio Kaku or Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene or whoever, who might well have been trying to share their love for physics, but seemed to produce a different kind of obnoxious physics bro, who thought that knowing that those things existed (or some theory of them existed) made them very bright (even though they didn't actually understand the things they were talking about), and I felt stupid and inadequate for not knowing about those things. In contrast to that, Feynman's discussion of physics to non-science and undergraduate audiences made me feel much more welcome in the field.
This channel does a lot of the same kind of work, presenting physics as something that can at least sometimes be accessible, albeit with some effort required to really understand, and it's a really nice bonus that it doesn't come with the self-aggrandizing casual misogyny of Feynman.
To be honest, most of the wacky propositions (I won't call them theories, because to be a theory, an idea has to be testable, and none of that nonsense is testable) are utter BS.
It comes out of the 1950's high energy physics community... Quantum physics doesn't offer any explanations or understanding, only probabilities, leading to what Feynman called "shut up and calculate". All of this nonsense is nothing more than mathematical masturbation, with zero connection to reality (especially string theory).
I could have majored in physics (I aced every single physics test I took .... and these were all of the "physics for physics majors" classes as prerequisites for electrical engineering courses), and can read and follow the papers, but it's all just "look at what mathematical gymnastics I can do" and nothing more.
I went into computer engineering so that I could do something useful in my life.
I think that is in part where you get into different kinds of people and personalities. For some people, clone kind of person is going to work better than others. I was never a physics guy, but the highly technical little professor types are more likely to be autistic. We have a tendency to info dump, lack social awareness, as a result are not politically correct, and tend to have a lot of issues with communication. That is one of the few traits that we share with the more debilitating kind of autism, is both we and them have issues getting information in and out effectively.
In school things tend not to be presented in ways that work for us and can understand, so we rely on a lot of independent study and have to figure things out on our own because we can't depend on professors or the education system to match our needs. Hence we will be ahead like that. Also, having an obsessive personality type contributes to that. It is not something we can help in most cases, because our brains don't work that way. Also our traits can be extremely varied which causes us problems at times, because we will have a core strength in our area and be highly defecient in another because our traits are so uneven.
Which is all to say, we all have struggles. With us sometimes out attributes stack to make us seem like geniuses or something in one specialized area, but we have to rely on that particular strength to compensate for all the other areas we are weak in. 😅
I think that is where she gets off a bit assuming being an "asshole" is by choice, and not due to a lack of social awareness and inability to be any other way. Also, I have no clue what her definition of misogyny is. How can you even casually hate someone?
I do get being annoyed by the hero worship stuff though. That annoys me with Musk personally for example. But people that have some aspects of them that is exceptional are more likely to have a different view of the world as a result, and you shouldn't expect them to be normal in every other way, otherwise you are discriminating.
I honestly think you can find this type of personality in every field. Especially if there's a pop reference that manages to pull you in, ie michio kaku.
I've experienced more or less the same thing when studying music and later on programming. I don't really know if it's age related or skill related, but in my personal experience I would say it's both, though it seems less likely you'll become a field-bro the older you get.
@@CapsAdmin That is kind of funny. I don't know if you are aware of this, but those two specific fields are linked-or at least they used to be. In terms of groups that slot into the spectrum along the high-function range that used to be associated with Asperger's Syndrome, we tended to get grouped as either auditory or visual types, just because certain attribute groups that tended to group would either present themselves with either audio or visual aptitudes. The group of autists who had talents in music were also the ones more likely to also show an aptitude in math and programming.
I am a visual type, and so while I can program and was pretty decent at it, it was not as good a fit for me as my friends who showed signs of similar traits but who were more attuned to music. Not sure if they still use that model anymore, but that was something that we would e told a couple of decades ago.
As far as "that type", assumed to be people who have those same autistic traits, I think we are far more concentrated than that. We seem to pool in specific areas, but as to why is a bit of a chicken or an egg argument. It may be that we have a certain tendency to certain interests or fields of study that appeal or are well adapted to how we process information or areas where our attributes are more directly applicable. Or, alternatively, it may be that those specific interests or field translate really well to adaptations and coping mechanisms we develop over the course of our lives due to some our areas of weakness.
So, for example, because we lack social awareness, many, if not all of us, develop these complex internal logic-based constructs that we then utilize to navigate social situations and predict outcomes or what behavior is appropriate based on previous observations or events, with heavy utilization of things like grouping or categorization of individuals or groups to model potential outcomes. That is how we are able to mask that weakness. The fields of study that we tend to excel at typically involve complex logic-based constructs/models that involve similar tricks as part of their functional utility.
The reason we are so good at those things is because we have been using and doing those things our whole lives. So, we are naturally inclined to any task, field, or interest that we can adapt those skills to, as they represent areas of strength. Further, points where things would seem more accessible to us compared to other groups who don't constantly have to rely on such methods as part of their day-to-day lives.. Coincidentally, it is also that sort of predictive modeling that might lead someone to theorize or assert that some sort of skill related to knitting might also translate to ability or aptitude in a particular type of mathematical study based on how things translate like that for us, and therefore is most likely not sexist or misogynistic in any way.
I wish women could just take jokes like we men do sometimes
When i was a teenager i loved the book, it was about this great physicist that ignored the rules and was super cool, that could do whatever he liked and no one dared to criticize him for it. It speaks very much to the male teenager brain. It is only after that you realize that it didnt have any physics in it, that it was written by Richard Feynman about himself, that it was his own fan fiction about himself and it starts to taste rotten.
He loves to talk about himself, say how cool he was, how he was always right, how his teachers was in so much awe of how good he was that he could do whatever he wanted.
What is completely missing from the book is all the mistakes he made that he can now laugh at, how he got things wrong that really threw him off. How much work he had to do in order to understand something. How much he struggled with something.
If we take me as an example i had a very hard time in calculus when we had to use sine and cosine, i could just not figure out when to use which when doing math problems.
A Zee was a professor at my undergrad university! Everyone was warned not to take the class he took because he was mean and sexist. He published a paper about the symmetry of womens breasts. A feynman bro through and through
oh my god i was wondering about how many cans of worms could that guy be worth because ughh
Gross
At my undergrad university, lecture halls came with ashtrays built into the seats so that students could smoke in class.
He is too based for you. You don’t deserve to have his children.
I wrote a comment about Zee as well but I completely forgot about the paper about breasts! I read about half a page of it before I gave up in horror
Contranarian - A person who pronounces words how they want despite being clearly wrong.
That was perfect, thank you. 😂
i unfortunately am a contranarian. i always pronounce 'philosophical' as 'philosolophical'... it just feels Right.
@@jlo9993 philosolophical is just philosophical, but with a guitar solo
The worst thing is when you realize that Feynmann bros are endemic to every major. I saw them in psych, philosophy, english, and in my education classes. It's horrible
Yep. It’s just narcissistic people
@@jordonharris9098 Can we stop calling all assholes narcissists? I'm convinced people don't even know what it means anymore, like sociopath or whatever it was a couple years ago. You can just say 'people are douchey and awful sometimes' without dressing it up in fancier language (thereby making that language useless for the purposes it was originally intended for). Yeah, this is a pet peeve of mine.
@@user-zu1ix3yq2w You're doing it too. ToT You can just say they're using trendy meaningless (originally not so) language a bit thoughtlessly without jumping to wackadoodle conclusions about how they're a bad dude, so THEY must be the bad word of the minute. Everyone does this to some extent IMO (as in dressing up people being crappy in overwrought political/psych language). I'd just prefer we think about it a bit more and perhaps go, 'Maybe I shouldn't do that, actually.' I'm not tryna Uno reverse card anyone lol. Maybe my original comment came off angrier IDK.
@@nnhhkk867 you’re right
@@nnhhkk867 Well said. The word narcissist is far, far, far too over-used to the point it's becoming the "literally" of nouns: a word so excessively used that it loses all meaning (to the point that dictionaries are now REDEFINING what the word "literal" means from LITERAL to factual, ughhh).
I will say this, we are INUNDATED with narcissists (and I think social media has amplified the problem): Trump, Musk, LeBron James ("the chosen one"), and many others.
I wonder if we have just as many narcissists as we've always had, or if the internet is amplifying the problem.
A question for the psychologists I suppose.
You may have lost a year of your life to this, but you are saving all of us watching a lot of time! Thank you for your service.
I don't know if this is any consolation, but the 'asking inane questions during lectures to try and show off how smart they are' is not a personality unique to physics. there are lots of people like that ive encountered in computer science and (afaik) we don't have a feynmann-like figure to model that behaviour for them.
yeah it's the same in math. >.
@@tant_antifa >~
We do have von Neumann (who we share with the physicists and mathematicians, I suppose), Rob Pike, John McCarthy, Andrew Tanembaum, Richard Stallman. All assholes to a considerable degree. Not to mention the amount of assholes in the tech field, which a lot of tech bros look up to (Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Musk, Altman).
Oh, and Dijkstra of course, who frequently wrote and distributed rants about how he was right and everyone else was wrong (and people frequently cite them).
@@oskarlappi9593 Definitely have assholes, but do we have people to model same behaviour that Feynmann does? I guess the closest would be Gates, Jobs, Musk, etc, especially because they're in the same boat of being famous for being famous, rather than being famous for their actual work.
Stallman is also probably the biggest inspiration for all 'erm, actually' moments, which is very much in the same vein as 'asking inane questions during lectures to show how much they know'
"I'm sure that female Feynman bros exist"
Oh my God, at least one does. I dated an incredibly toxic female physics grad student obsessed with Richard Feynman and this video explains so much. Angela, I wish I had seen this video first and known what a red flag that was.
I was a female Feynman fan in STEM who already hated his misogyny and assholeness. But I never met the Feynman Bro criteria. Many of the stories in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman are about Feynman tricking people into thinking he's something he's not, especially making him look smarter, which calls into question everything he says. For example, IIRC, he tried to solemnly troll a colleague into thinking he could do a large calculation in his head summing terms through pure brain power, when he actually had found a mathematical shortcut. Multiple stories like this should clue the reader into realizing he's an unreliable narrator.
This is in addition to what Angela already discussed about his unbelievable interactions with women, and faking speaking a language to a native speaker. She explained why these are fake better than I ever could. It was deeply cathartic.
After watching this, I am no longer a Feynman fan and feel embarrassed, but like before, there are some useful lessons to learn from him (and most male scientists and authors) that are unrelated to their misogyny. For example, he showed it's possible to simplify scientific explanations so it's more accessible.
@@H._sapiens *"misogyny"*
What evidence do you have that Mr. Feynman hated women?
@@bricaaron3978 Why are you commenting on a video you haven't watched?
@@bricaaron3978watch the video before making ridiculous comments
@@bricaaron3978 EYOOOOOOOOO WE GOT A DEBRATE BRO IN THE HOUSE Y'ALL
SQUARE UP, THEY'RE COMING AT US WITH TATTOOS ON THEIR KNUCKLES
ONE READS "FACTS"
THE OTHER READS "LOGIC"
Hollywood, listen up: Angela has teed up a *goldmine* of a film-an adaptation of _Surely You're Joking,_ *leaning in all the way* into the dramatic irony angle. Feyman spends the whole film going around doing incredibly cringey things thinking he's awesome while everyone around him is just so incredibly embarrassed on his behalf.
Also: the thing about Bob and Ralph Leighton reminds me of when F1 driver Carlos Sainz Jr. was asked who his idol was, he answered Fernano Alonzo and not, you know, legendary racecar driver Carlos Sainz Sr.
Main issue is that, given the current landscape of media comprehension, a bunch of feyman bros would watch it and end up feeling that the movie is about how awesome feyman was and how awesome they are by extension, no matter how hard you try to make it clear that they are being criticized in text.
it's fucked
@@EmaAlvarado_iku We are totally screwed.
See: election
We live in a post-truth world unfortunately.
Sad times. Sad, sad, times.
@@feynmanschwingere_mc2270 A "post-truth" world implies we were in a world that cared about truth.
Also comes idea of barely accepting women as physicist during his lectures and at the same time mocking waitress for not knowing physics. Absurdly contradictory
11:45 "I know like I'm going to sound like I'm complaining way too much, but--" look, mate, even if you had no further anecdotes or experiences after that one, /that was enough/, because wtf. Like what the actual... what. What? What.
Like, I know you have processed that this behavior was inappropriate and sexist but it also sounds like you've had to deal with a lot of people minimizing it so I want to reinforce/validate again that yeah that was messed-up and sexist.
*the anecdotes go on*
...wow.
Also, you've just explained some of the question-askers in my Thermo class whom I always found confusing and frustrating.
I'd be remiss if I didn't add: for other folks going through similar things, Title IX, profs, TAs, and other school personnel are all official resources that can help, though it can be understandably difficult, especially when someone can cross the line of what's a problem/distressing/intimidating well before they cross the line of what's actionable, and sometimes those people just utterly fail you like they did in this situation. Unofficially helpful, fellow students who are on your side and know about the situation can help you feel safer and help bad actors feel less comfortable pulling their crap.
I watched 15 minutes of this video and thought "what could you possibly talk about for 2.5 more hours?" And now I'm almost 2 hours in can't stop watching lol. Your perspective is so valuable to the world right now.
15 minutes in, and all she's done is complain about guys who are socially awkward and other guys who assholes and who, DECADES AFTER FEYNMAN DIED, happened to latch onto Feynman rather than something else.
I haven't heard one actual criticism of Feynman yet.
This woman has serious issues, and Feynman isn't a single one of them.
@akulkis you're gonna feel like a real asshole by the time you finish the video lol.
@@akulkis ofc Feynman is not the issue, this is not a hit piece on Richard Feynman. It's a look on 3 distinct entities: Feynman the person, Feynman the physicist and Feynman the brand and her opinion on why the brandification is toxic and people shouldn't blindly create idols from people and it's better to look a bit deeper than the marketable brand.
@@akulkis You're a little bit slow
@@akulkisyou seem to be taking this emotionally instead of logically. You didn't even finish the video before making this comment.
I realized that one of the things about your video that bring me joy is the fact that you've found an eager and sizeable audience through casually discussing these topics. It's quite hopeful and nice.
I feel like we're on the verge of a deep analysis of our culture through the past 100 years or more. There's a lot of good culture analysis media popping up. Also, science history and culture is very important for future students IMO. We are connected to our history more than we think and we can not just learn a lot about our culture, but it will help us learn about scientific concepts and why specifically they popped up in the first place. I think this adds a dimension to learning that is very helpful and one we've overlooked.
Highly recommend Jenny Nicholson if you like this content. She's got a way with formulating thoughts, great charisma.
Also ProbablyJacob if you like video games or oftentimes insane alien/cryptid theories. He's got a lovable snark I always found similar to Angela and Jenny. His video most similar to this format is "is cryptozoology just American shinto?"
@@glowerworm Big fan of both Jenny and Angela, think I've seen 1 (one) ProbablyJacob vid in the past and it didn't jive w me that much. 'Is cryptozoology just American shinto?' made my ears perk up like a dog hearing it's time for walkies, yesss! An intersection of my interests!!! Will be checking him out, thanks for the rec. (And sorry for the exclamation marks lol.)
@@Rockyzach88 One thing that's crazy to me is that my kid, whose 13, has been exposed to the most amazing analysis through UA-cam. I just did not have access to that sort of approach to thinking until college, really. High school English on a very good day. The internet is in so many ways awful, but having a generation that has seen how to take things apart and talk about how they work since elementary school is going to be interesting.
This video isn't about Feynman, it is about the classic male hero complex, delusion, and lack of self-awareness. I am sure many of the dudes you met 10-15 years after you met them, are realizing just now that they were total f*cking creeps. And you are badass.
I feel like the point about him speaking gibberish can't be overstated. Like- there's no WAY they thought he was speaking a dialect they didn't understand. They were soothing the ego of the Great Man, because embarrassing him in public would have been far, far worse for them. It's honestly disgusting.
Thank you, I agree 100%. That anecdote in particular really ticked me off as an immigrant who's had people be casually xenophobic to me. With the misogyny it's like 'disappointed, but not surprised,' unfortunately. There's plenty of precedent for nerdbro misogyny, but I can't say I've ever heard of something like that. It's almost cruel and unusual. Angela had way more restraint than me in using a Swedish person, my mind immediately went to 'Oh God, he's definitely done this to people from Asia or Africa.' Or just any country not as respected in science as Sweden, the social disparity there is clear.
Genuinely shocking he (or those posthumously speaking for him) thinks so little of people that this would work or that this is a charming anecdote to tell people. Imagine a leading figure in your field, probably a personal hero, publicly humiliating and otherising you like that. (TMI but after nervously laughing it off I think I would excuse myself to the bathroom to have a little cry.) Insane lack of awareness.
Respect the guy's contributions to physics, but even assuming the majority of the stuff around him is stuff he made up out of insecurity, it just belies such an unpleasant world view I can't think of him as a cool guy on a personal level.
@@nnhhkk867 To be clear about what's happening here, you just made up a story that he did racist things-and then reacted to it as if it were real. 🤔
The actual anecdote is specific to one language-Italian-due to a unique personal history with that particular language (hours of listening to Italian every day on a radio station during a commute).
Neither did this occur with colleagues or students when he was a famous physicist; this occurred, in his anecdotes, 1) when passing a random Italian person on a noisy street and responding to their own initial Italian with his fake version; and 2)-the only time he claims to have certainly fooled someone-a pair of schoolteachers... who didn't speak Italian.
It would be rather strange if he also "did this" with an African or Asian language, given the scarcity of !Kung-only radio stations in 1970s NY, and the lower chance of an African or Asian person assuming he was a native African/Asian in the first place.
@@nnhhkk867 To be clear about what's happening here, you just made up a story that he did rcist things-and then reacted to it as if it were real. 🤔
The actual anecdote is specific to one language-Italian-due to a unique personal history with that particular language (hours of listening to Italian every day on a radio station during a commute).
Neither did this occur with colleagues or students when he was a famous physicist; this occurred, in his anecdotes, 1) when passing a random Italian person on a noisy street and responding to their own initial Italian with his fake version; and 2)-the only time he claims to have certainly fooled someone-a pair of schoolteachers... who didn't speak Italian.
It would be rather strange if he also "did this" with an African or Asian language, given the scarcity of !Kung-only radio stations in 1970s NY, and the lower chance of an African or Asian person assuming he was a native African/Asian in the first place.
@@Kveldred Actually, as Angela points out, the story of fooling foreigners by speaking gibberish to them was not just a single anecdote: it is a common theme repeated throughout his "autobiographies".
@@BenInSeattle Yeah? What's another instance?
The only other anecdote specifically about a foreign language I can recall off the top of my head involves him giving up on learning Japanese-not pretending to know it. But I'm not a big Feynman fan, so perhaps I am just unaware.
Again, though, the person I responded to *_literally_* made something up to get upset about-not even "heard secondhand and jumped to conclusions" or something, but actually just invented a bad thing and then proceeded to fret over it. It is truly puzzling to me.
Still in the middle of enjoying this one but wanted to mention a small correction: the ERA still doesn't exist today! Doesn't change your point, it's just something I think about too much and get angry about too much.
Didn't expect you here. Hi.
The ERA is essentially written into the Constitution. Just gotta elect people that can read the thing, and leave, say, their religious beliefs elsewhere.
I have to say, the "Richard Feynman didn't write any books" revelation kind of just piqued my interest for some reason, but hearing that the layout of the first book mistakenly gave people the impression that it was an autobiography made my jaw literally drop and I have no idea why it hit so hard lol
Some people just don't seem to bother to read the introduction to books. That's their problem.
Anybody who thought "Surely ..." was an autobiography just doesn't know what an autobiography is. It is just a collection of anecdotes, but they are Feynnan's anecdotes. The fact that he spoke them instead of wrote them is of no importance.
There is absolutely no way any thinking person could be mistaken about that. The author makes it explicitly clear in the introduction, and IIRC it even says "as told to Ralph Leighton" on the cover.
My heart is pounding with anger at the discussion about the Feynman bros and their inappropriate behavior. I had the misfortune of dealing with people like that in my senior year of high school but I was so privileged to go to a women’s centered university because the environment was so much healthier. I can’t imagine dealing with that behavior for several years and seeing how permissive authorities are with that level of misconduct and shittiness. Ugh, it makes my blood boil.
writing this at 1:21:00 so idk if angela gets into this, but re: him worrying about not seeming manly, there's a very popular stereotype of jewish men being nebbishy and unmanly and effeminate. as someone who grew up in new york he was definitely dealing with these sorts of stereotypes
Good old antisemitism...
your post sounds like damage control - many people faced those stereotypes and most of them were not sexists assholes about it. Probably you are not damage control on purpose, but whatever - its youtube in 2024... the higher chance belongs to the outcome where you are actually a sexist and also anti-human AI.
My uncle says that he met Feynman once. When he learned my uncle spoke French and lived in France, Feynman started doing the French gibberish thing. My uncle realized shortly that those weren't actually French words, but did marvel that it seemed to be a good imitation of French sounds, just not in the right order. So no, didn't "assume he was speaking a different dialect". Realized it was gibberish and was somewhat amused that it could somewhat pass for the real language assuming that the listener didn't actually speak any French. Feynman would've probably told it as "managing to fool an English professor living in France."
@@user-zu1ix3yq2w No, no, no. SMART people do DUMB things all the time. I assure you.
Humans are complicated and hardly employ their logic universally. It's why you can get a genius who believes ludicrous things. .
@@user-zu1ix3yq2w Yeah, this doesn't make sense; the actual anecdote from Feynman is about a) listening to hours and hours of Italian on an Italian radio-station during commutes, b) learning a bit of real Italian and shouting it back when Italians on the street shouted something in Italian to him, and c), in the only instance in which he claims to have certainly fooled someone, amusing some children with fake Italian and fooling their teachers... who didn't speak Italian.
This comment sounds like someone only familiar with Angela's misremembered retelling and thinking "hey, I can make up a good story to jump in here!"
@@KveldredFWIW, there is a song "Prisencolinensinencuisol" by acclaimed Italian artist Adriano Celentano which is entirely nonsense syllables. The song was inspired by what Italians sounded like singing American pop music that they didn't actually understand. The song has no official lyrics, but he sings the same thing every time he performs the song (and there are a LOT of recordings of it}.
It's brilliant. When I first heard it years ago, I thought of that anecdote. The fact that an acclaimed Italian artist literally did the inverse as both a criticism of and a tribute to both cultures served, by my lights, to properly frame that anecdote and its spirit. If somehow I am naive and pollyanna for believing that Feynman did earnestly and simply appreciate this also, oh well! I suppose that's a risk I'm willing to take lol.
I would have thought refusing to read a play about a man making a deal with the devil only to make the world a worse place and lose connection to people he loves, then going on to work on the Manhattan Project, was an artistic flourish.
But now in context, I’m thinking this entirely slipped by him.
In the story, Feynman says he actually read the play, but could not make head or tails of it, so he was unwilling to do the assignment and write an essay on the morals of the story. He wrote an essay about a topic he actually understood, and put in a few sentences at the end that related it to what is in the play.
The moral seemed to be that you should not force children to make up BS on something they don't understand... But "Feynman was a science bro who was dismissive of the arts" fits better into this video essay.
@@KlausJLinke Hey, thanks for the extra detail! That at least has a perspective I can understand in an era before wikipedia, clif notes, or other more accessible resources.
@@KlausJLinke You know, his IQ was purportedly "only" 120. Which, in the context of this story, actually makes sense.
He was nowhere near the polyglot others like Einstein, Poincare and Von Neuman were. His language/verbal intelligence left a lot to be desired (perhaps because he didn't read a lot of books as a child).
You'd think a genius like Feynman could understand Faust. I mean, like, really? If children should not be forced to make up BS on something they don't understand, can't that same logic be applied to children who don't understand, say trigonometry, but are forced to complete homework assignments on it?
I get that Feynman bros love the guy but, for a genius, he had several intellectual weak spots and wasn't nearly as diverse in his thinking as I assumed he would be.
@@feynmanschwingere_mc2270 Congrats I guess if you fully understood the ethics of Faust as a child, simply by reading it. I would not force a child to write about trigonometry, if it had not been taught about trigonometry, and "Faust" isn't an introductory course to Ethics 101.
I think the story does show that young Feynman thought about ethics more than children that just followed the assignment.
@@feynmanschwingere_mc2270 I feel like mentioning his IQ is kind of buying into the narrative in a way... like if it turned out he'd actually scored 160 or 170 or something it would sound like it had invalidated your point. I remember how the dude who's technically scored the highest IQ score ever is some racist antisemitic butthead.
My point is that IQ is basically meaningless for real life performance one way or another. I've seen people with low IQ achieve much more genuine intellectual achievement than idiots with high IQ.
I just want to add that the term “sexual harassment” wasn’t coined until the 1970s, and wasn’t popularized until 1975 by women at Cornell after Carmita Wood was forced to quit her job due to harassment from her supervisor in the (you guessed it!) physics department. So these women were enduring harassment from Feinman and/but didn’t have adequate language to describe what they were experiencing. Gross.