Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"Some people think that the magic of something wondrous is diminished when it's understood. I feel bad for those people." -- Shanemhansen
They themselves are just clouds of gas and dust where protostars have begun to form.
Stellar clusters are what you would call a collection of stars.
Also on the note of cosmology and astrophysics being strikingly young fields, I think that's fair statement if we consider their modern definitions. Although their core ideas have already been discussed in a lot of ancient civilizations. It was a lot more philosophical and less rooted in science though (except for the observational astronomy, which remains perhaps one of the oldest scientific discipline).
Modern astrophysics still carries the baggage of obsolete terminology to this day, from names of objects to names of units.
The recent HN thread Why is the sky blue? is a good example of this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46946401
Once you start going down the rabbit hole you start asking questions like "does the photon oscillate?", "what exactly is resonant frequency?", "how different is the electron cloud around a molecule from that around its constituent atoms?", "how does a photon passing by/through a molecule cause its electron cloud to oscillate?" etc. The act of clarifying each to oneself in however simple a form is the insight we all crave. Good teachers like Feynman do a great job of it which is why their books are so highly valued.
PS: People might find the recent free book Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites (2025) good for an initial understanding of atomic physics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595
My favourite lecture is the standalone "The Principle of Least Action" at
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html
Audio: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html#Ch19-audi...
> Later chapters do not depend on the material of this special lecture—which is intended to be for “entertainment”
We might say this is the most important chapter in the whole series.
For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time while staying away from the internet and its attention hogging.
Since most pre-1925 books are out of copyright and free on https://gutenberg.org, ACM is open access (https://dl.acm.org/) and we have open https://arxiv.org/, it is the golden age for readers seeking original content.
We don’t need bots to read for us. We can live in the mind of human writers.
But yes, he does catch criticism for his very real character flaws, his grandiosity, his philandering and inappropriate workplace behavior, and his physical abuse of his wife.
He was a complicated person. Much of the work discussing him is hagiography. This essay is even keeled but does not gloss over his flaws. Again, she discusses his very real contributions and legacy. It's a long essay; she makes time for the complexity of Feynman as a person.
If all you want to hear about Feynman is charming stories about Tuvan throat singing, you won't enjoy this essay. That's okay; it's not for everyone. There's an instinct to reject a critical work like this on it's face. I think that does a disservice, not only to Collier, but to us as students of history.
Collier is a working astrophysicist who spent months on this project. It is not a low effort hit piece. It's a critical but fair portrait from someone qualified to engage with the subject matter. I encourage everyone to withhold judgement until watching the entire essay. If you haven't seen it, you probably shouldn't make a knee jerk dismissal.
I could not disagree more. If you don't see how a comprehensive, warts and all look at the man's life and legacy doesn't add context and foster curiosity, I'm not even sure what to tell you.
It didn't derail the conversation, it expanded it. There's still plenty of discussion about the lectures. This isn't even particularly close to the top of the thread.
What's opposed to curious discussion is knee jerk reactions and middlebrow dismissals.
These sort of people are what is pejoratively called "attention whores" with nothing worthwhile to contribute on the topic under discussion. Hence they always come up with provocative phrases/statements simply to make themselves feel relevant.
Downvote and Flag these sorts of comments into oblivion; don't engage with them.
(1) The stories in "Surely you are joking Mr. Feynman" portray Feynman in a mean-spirited, sometimes sexist light. (2) These books were not actually written by Mr. Feynman. They were actually written by Ralph Laden. (3) Upon further reflection, almost all the stories are either made up or greatly exaggarated. Presumably, Feynman spent a lot of time telling and retelling these stories (4) Also, Ralph Laden is Bob Laden's son. Supposedly, Bob Laden is also a famous physicist. But Ralph never really mentions him
How this guy captures the imagination of the English speaking world is astonishing.
Sommerfeld Landau Schwinger
They mop the floor with Feynman but no one remembers them. Landau, meanwhile had the most comprehensive set of physics book, Sommerfeld the most accessible deep set of physics books.
Meanwhile "the Feynman Lectures" burry important details that will derail a train as soon as you leave the safe space of first order approximations.
Feynman's lectures are akin to the "everything is a mass on a spring" meme. Actually, nothing is, and the nobilities are everything. To his credit, though, Feynman never intended his lectures to be more than an intro survey class
I am the OP who posted this with an idea of eliciting other notable works on Physics and comparing them to Feynman Lectures. I do not want this to be derailed into talking about the man.
While i know of Landau & Lifshitz, i have not read Arnold Sommerfeld's nor Julian Schwinger's works.
I sincerely suggest that you post a top-level comment in this thread with your takes on Feynman vs. Other authors works that you mention. This would be of great help to everybody interested in Physics and Science.
As he said, he was just an ordinary person who worked very hard.
The 100 IQ person that works that hard doesn't invent that much physics. They might get rich, change the world etc.
At any rate, this garbage doesn’t belong on HN.
What's next... is she going to tell me that Newton was a real asshole? Noooooo, say it isn't so.
Anyway, I’m a big Feynman fan. My Discord handle is feynman1918.
Given how different this wife's (second wife) description of Feynman compared to others is, that there are no record of complaints from first wife, the way her younger sister describes him, it could well be an earlier repeat of the now familiar Johnny Depp story, where it's not initially clear who the abusive person here is.
The marriage was certainly not a happy one and some people turn vindictive, turn to smearing characters. Especially if the person has narcissistic tendencies.
[Who Smeared Feynman] https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-f...
Submitted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46974999
(And also, "cutting him a tiny bit of slack" is pretty lax language considering the behavior being criticized includes beating his wife.)
From the about the authors in the OP's link "Feynman was a remarkably effective educator. Of all his numerous awards, he was especially proud of the Oersted Medal for Teaching, which he won in 1972.". He probably didn't do a lot of the stuff he popularised, but that was what he did, it is a skill taking abstract stuff and making it coherent. I know when I did physics (in the 90's) many swore by his books, particularly for quantum, it was a bit of a secret we'd have these incomprehensible books on quantum, and someone would say - have you seen "The Feynman lectures", they are good, I wish we had the videos available at the time.
Moral relativism is a thing, but I think a more useful way to think of it rather than just saying "misogyny was a thing back then, should we care he was a misogynist then?" is to ask "if he were to have lived and worked in the 2000s, would he associate with Epstein?" And to be honest… Feynman does strike me as the kind of person to have the intellect to attract Epstein's attention and also the, for lack of a better term, party attitude to go to a couple of Epstein's parties that would result in him having awkward press releases trying to explain that he just had no possible idea that Epstein was doing anything sexual with children and conveniently forgetting all the times he was on the private island for some party or another...
That's the real strong vibe I get from Surely You're Joking. He's the kind of person who wants to be seen as someone who gets up to wacky hijinks, to be seen as "cool," and he specifically interprets "cool" in a way that's misogynistic even at a time (when he was dictating the stories that led to Surely You're Joking) when misogyny was starting to become a professional hindrance.
(And one of the things that really worries me about Surely You're Joking is that it's often recommended as a sort of "look at the wacky hijinks you can get up to as a physicist," so recommending the book is a valorization of his wacky hijinks and... well, that's ultimately what Angela's video is about, that's a thing we need to stop doing.)
This is from Lawrence Krauss[0]'s email to Epstein[1]:
> ps. I have decided that Feynman would have done what I did... and I am therefore content.. no matter what... :)
> On Apr 6, 2011, at 3:56 PM, Jeffrey Epstein wrote:
> what evidence? no real sex.. where is she getting her so called facts
Krauss's letter is obviously horrible in its implications. What's interesting to me is his interpretation of what Feynman would have done. Is it his delusional justification of what he'd done with Epstein, or is it based on a certain reputation of Feynman in the science community?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Krauss [1] https://www.epstein.media/files/house_oversight_030915/
In my experience, everyone who says this is talking about exactly one chapter in Surely You're Joking, but they don't appear to actually have paid close attention to the story. It's a story that Feynman recounts about trying to pick up girls when he was younger. He was advised by an older, "cooler" man to be mean. Feynman tries it and it works, but he feels bad about it and says that he never did it again. People calling Feynman a misogynist for this story seem to have just skipped the end of the chapter.
The episode that really stuck in my mind was the episode about his competition with the abacus-user, who was better at math, which essentially ends with him giving up trying to explain how he could mental math a cube root faster, because the abacus-user was just someone who couldn't understand a math explanation.
That chapter wasn’t the only thing I ended up skipping or heavily editing.
* Picking a room at Los Alamos with a window facing the women’s housing, but being disappointed that a tree or something blocked his view. (Wasn’t he also married at this point?)
* Starting a new Uni faculty position and hanging out at student dances, dismayed that girls would stop chatting & dancing with him when they learned he was a prof and not a fellow student.
* Hanging out at strip clubs to practice his drawing skills.
* Considering a textbook sales rep’s offer to help him find “trouble” in Vegas.
So maybe that one chapter turns around some at the end, but it’s not the only cringe-worthy moment in the book, and I can see why some people may have an overall negative opinion.
If I were going to do this with my kids now that they are teens, I wouldn’t filter as much and use the more questionable events as points of discussion.
The video actually addresses this very point in the first few minutes:
> the second component of the Feynman lifestyle that the Feynman bro has to follow, you know as told in this book, is that women are inherently inferior to you and if you want to be the smartest big boy physicist in the room you need to make sure they know that I think people are sometimes shocked to hear this like that that exists in this book especially because as I said if you were a precocious teenager interested in physics people shoved this book at you they just put it into your hands like oh you want to be a physicist here's the coolest physicist ever
> I feel like it's at this point in the video when like Mr. Cultural Relativism is going to show up in the comments and be like how dare you judge people from the past on their actions that's not fair things were different back then women liked when men lied to them and pretended to be an undergrad so that-- it was fine back then it was fine and I just, no, actually this book was published 40 years ago which is just not that long ago Richard Feynman should have known that women were people 40 years ago like absolutely not it's not "how things were back then" what's wrong with you people, no, it's inappropriate then it's inappropriate now
Later the actual author, Ralph Leighton, of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is mentioned so perhaps the responsibility for what was included is his more than Feynman's. I think the criticism stands that the degree of sexism effectively celebrated by inclusion was certainly less culturally accepted in 1985 when the book was published than when the events occurred, and that's the point of raising the issue of why was it judged as good and proper to include this marginalizing anecdotes when his actual contributions to physics and teaching were worthy of celebration.
The behaviour is hardly laudable, but "celebrated" it is not.
The argument presented in the video about this is that these are the stories Feynman edited and reworked over time, and shared with his friend Ralph Leighton, who then recorded them in the "Surely You're Joking" book.
The video also describes a change in his behavior later in life. In 1974, responding to a letter asking to reprint "What is Science?"[1] from 1966, he comments that "some of the remarks about the female mind might not be taken in the light spirit they were meant"[2]. This is cited in the video as Feynman becoming more progressive between 1966 and 1974. The "Surely" book is published in 1985, and yet still includes the misogynistic stories. The video's complaint is that there should be some contextualization about views changing, like was given in Feynman's reply in 1974, but there being none it comes across as an implicit endorsement. I don't recall from the video if Feynman reviewed or edited the "Surely" book, which leaves it as Ralph Leighton's perspective more than Feynman's.
It seems a legitimate criticism that this book held up as an example of a good role model in physics doesn't try to avoid perpetuating bad stereotypes. It's probably egregious to say the mere inclusion of the stories celebrates their actions. But it's equally egregious to fail to even try to address the bad behavior, especially when it's held out as a positive example.
[1] https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
[2] https://archive.org/details/perfectly-reasonable-deviations-...
This was during divorce testimony. She got the house and he got the bongos.
Based on that viewing, I think the author has a chip on her shoulder about Feynman, and is dismissive about his teaching and books, and is set on convicting him of being a very naughty boy.
One of the things that stand out from the video: The speaker says that Feynman didn't write the Feynman lectures. Wrong. He wrote and delivered the lectures. If you go to Caltech's Feynman lectures website, they even have audio of him delivering the lectures [0] and photographs of the chalk board [1]. How could someone make a 3-hour-long video about Feynman and not even know this?
Feynman was an immensely gifted physicist and one of the most (maybe the most) engaging and innovative physics teachers of the last century. You can criticize him for embellishing stories about himself, but those stories are incredibly entertaining and quirky, which is why so many people like them. He was a big personality, and it comes out in his stories. He wasn't a perfect person, but no one is, and there has been a movement in the last few years to try to demonize him (mostly unsuccessfully, given Feynman's continued popularity).
Finally, if one makes a video with a title like, "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman," one can't complain about getting pushback.
No, she's right, just talking about a different thing.
"The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is a physics textbook. [0] He did prepare his own lecture material, but he did not write the book.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...
Saying that Feynman didn't write the book is just dishonest, unless you immediately clarify afterwards that Feynman did indeed write almost all of the material in the book, in something very close to its final form.
It's a low effort way to do that when the other party cannot defend himself.
At that time it was common to allege extreme behavior (often mutually agreed upon), to Trump up the charges just to make the divorce go through.
I'm not saying it's ok... But it doesn't break my heart.
I guess it depends on how much pressure he applied.
The videos are particularly interesting in how they include a transcript which is auto-highlighted and one can click around the text to move in the video. That’s a great mode of interaction I wish were more common. I have only found it in Apple’s WWDC videos.
It’s missing a way to link directly to a timestamp, and when switching videos from the tabs the URL doesn’t change, but those are minor inconveniences considering the rest of the website.
Also kudos on choice of using the structure of the atom image as the “loading” graphic.
Thank you to the authors for putting this together.
His involvement in NASA and challenger investigations specifically are also legendary. Watch more Feynman. Totally worth the time investment.
But then I read more about him and yeah, he is indeed the real deal.
Feynman is definitely not like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kaku. He was a very creative and technically sophisticated physicist. All his popular books are based on lectures he wrote and gave but they were mostly "side projects" e.g. computation, lectures on gravitation, six easy pieces etc.
To get a better sense of his work, I would highly recommend:
- The Beat of a Different Drum by Jagdish Mehra
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
- Selected Papers - https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4270 (expensive and technical)
- QED and the men who made it by Schweber
There are also many historical physicists who are surprisingly unknown outside the field - Schwinger, Tomonaga, Landau, Sidney Coleman, Murray Gell-mann, Nambu, Steven Weinberg, Ken Wilson, Curtis Callan etc. I just randomly picked a few names before the 90s but these are all scientific giants. For example, Schwinger's papers are notoriously hard to read but his books are great after a first course. Sidney Coleman gave beautiful lectures on QFT. Landau is extremely famous for his 9 books with Lifshitz. It definitely is very surprising that Feynman has such an outsized share of interest. Maybe because he was a gregarious outgoing character?
Another interesting aspect is how a person is often viewed as an authority or even a genius because their work introduces an audience to the subject. Feynman with his lectures. To a far lesser extent (in my opinion), one sees this with Andrej Karpathy and Jeremy Howard. This is not to take away from their wonderful teaching work. I know how hard it is to distill material and convey it. But, there's a whole web of contributions that leads to a subject maturing enough to be taught clearly.
As I get older, I find it less useful to assign labels (names) to discoveries and contributions. As Feynman himself said in a lecture after drawing a Feynman diagram, "this is THE diagram" (and not the Feynman diagram).
¹ Ordinary people can relate to a giant industrial project and a huge boom. They cannot relate to some person sitting in a room writing arcane symbols and muttering to themselves until one day they yell "Heureka! Ich hab es gefunden!" or whatever the proper German is and rush off to publish a paper.
Schwinger was considered a tremendous educator. I think he had ~90 PhD students and four won Nobel prizes. His lectures were often described as Mozart symphonies. I have studied parts of his books and the experience was always eye-opening. But, his education was focused on students, mostly graduate students. He was also a shy character.
In any case, I still love reading Feynman and Schwinger's works. I would also include Sommerfeld, Pauli, Landau, Weinberg in that list.
But, beyond that, yes, I think we're largely in agreement.
Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.
A book like Modern Atomic Physics by Vasant Natarajan (2015) would be a good place to look - https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Atomic-Physics/Natarajan/p/...
The recent book (free) Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites (2025) should also be good for an initial understanding of atomic physics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595
Also Wikipedia has a helpful Timeline of fundamental physics discoveries page to browse - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_fundamental_physic...
Finally, asking Google something like "what is new in physics since feynman lectures", Gemini gave me a helpful summary in its "AI Overview" which you can also try out.
we are entering the period of mourning
what was
won is n
ow lost
and the later days once feared are...
now here.
(the poet called bib)
I presume the original videos of Feynman are lost, or never existed?
I found this channel to be ok-ish.
"I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on."
Great advice! Not misogynistic at all!
I highly recommend reading it. It's not worse than calling someone who exploits drunk women as 'dickhead'.
Lastly the word 'bitch' used here is an important part of the particular story where he used it against particular women who scammed him during the confrontation later.
Read it as whole
Most importantly, the outcome does not validate the approach as healthy behaviour and even Feynman himself makes it clear at the end that the method was effective in a narrow sense but not enjoyable or aligned with how he ultimately wanted to interact with people. That distancing is important context: it suggests the episode was more an observation about social dynamics than a recommendation for how people should behave.
“For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation.”
p. 196: "In general, in quantum mechanics, the outgoing state at time t is eⁱᴴᵗ Ψᵢₙ where Ψᵢₙ is the input state, for a system with Hamiltonian H. To try to find, for a given special time t, the Hamiltonian which will produce M = eⁱᴴᵗ when M is such a product of non-commuting matrices, from some simple property of the matrices themselves, appears to be very difficult.
We realize, however, that at any particular time, if we expand eⁱᴴᵗ out (as 1 + iHt − H²t²⁄2 + …) we'll find the operator H operating an innumerable arbitrary number of times — once, twice, three times, and so forth — and the total state is generated by a superposition of these possibilities. This suggests that we can solve this problem of the composition of these A’s in the following way..."
> Can a quantum system be probabilisticaUy simulated by a classical (probabilistic, I'd assume) universal computer? In other words, a computer which will give the same probabilities as the quantum system does. If you take the computer to be the classical kind I've described so far, (not the quantum kind described in the last section) and there're no changes in any laws, and there's no hocus-pocus, the answer is certainly, No! This is called the hidden-variable problem: it is impossible to represent the results of quantum mechanics with a classical universal device.
Another unique lecture is a 1959 one [2] about the potential of nanotechnology (not even a real thing back then). He speaks of directly manipulating atoms and building angstrom-scale engines and microscope with a highly unusual perspective, extremely fascinating for anyone curious about these things and the historical perspective. Even for Feynman’s standards, this was a unique mix of topics and terminology. For context, the structure of DNA has been discovered about 5 years prior, and the first instruments capable of atomic imaging and manipulation are from at least the 80’s.
If you’re captivated by this last one as I was, I can also recommend Greg Bear’s novel “Blood Music”. It doesn’t explore the nanotechnology side much, but the main hook is biological cells as computers. Gets very crazy from there on.
1. https://s2.smu.edu/~mitch/class/5395/papers/feynman-quantum-... 2. https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agu68RGaoWM&list=PLUl4u3cNGP...
He also got the Nobel prize in the 90s for making a Bose-Einstein condensate iirc.
It relates more to the Bell results, that there doesn’t exist a hidden variable system that’s equivalent to QM.
Although that being said the rough outline of a field is usually worked out almost immediately after a consensus forms that it's "real" so to speak.