The fact he got his Nobel prize in part thanks to a way of representing interactions between particle is quite telling.
His books, and even more so his BBC interview (have yet to dive into the Physics lectures) completely changed my perspective on science.
I liked it, and wanted to love it, but watching him talk about fire and photosynthesis finally made it all click together.
Those weren’t abstract formulas, or curious and amusing concepts. All of it was deeply tied to everything around me, and somehow managed to make it all much more fascinating. I didn’t know the formulas, or the exact rules, but I got a general understanding of each of these processes and, feeling like a child once again, actually wanted to know more.
It was suddenly so obvious, and yet... why did it take all this time? And why couldn’t anyone else help me realise that earlier?
I certainly could blame the French education system, which isn’t really fond of making itself likeable or giving meaning to what it teaches, but still... it seems much more widespread than that.
So... I wouldn’t be surprised if he is both directly and indirectly responsible for many other physicists actually getting into research and developing this "intuition" that comes with truly understanding.
Edit: Also, his explanation is the first satisfying one I’ve ever gotten to "What is fire?" since I started asking the question over a decade ago.
I’d also say the path integral is not what he is most known for among practicing physicists, but that’s another story (I recommend “QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga@).
“When after some weeks I had a chance to talk to Oppenheimer, I was astonished to discover that his reasons for being uninterested in my work were quite the opposite of what I had imagined. I had expected that he would disparage my program as merely unoriginal, a minor adumbration of Schwinger and Feynman. On the contrary, he considered it to be fundamentally on the wrong track. He thought adumbrating Schwinger and Feynman to be a wasted effort, because he did not believe that the ideas of Schwinger and Feynman had much to do with reality.
I HAD KNOWN THAT HE HAD NEVER APPRECIATED FEYNMAN, but it came as a shock to hear him now violently opposing Schwinger, his own student, whose work he had acclaimed so enthusiastically six months earlier. He had somehow become convinced during his stay in Europe that physics was in need of radically new ideas, that this quantum electrodynamics of Schwinger and Feynman was just another misguided attempt to patch up old ideas with fancy mathematics.”
[1] Dyson F. Disturbing the Universe. Henry Holt and Co, 1979 ISBN 9780465016778.
This quote and an earlier one I made are from Oliver Consa's 2020 paper: "Something is rotten in the state of QED".
But they spent time around him in a working context, and they are all absolutely clear in their minds that, beyond the showmanship, he was a genius.
There are parts where he goes totally /r/redpill that would get him in trouble today if he were still alive.
Could you please rephrase what you wrote here, but without using the word "problematic" when describing a person? Thank you very much.
To do this requires resisting this sort of provocation in oneself—i.e. waiting until the activation dies down, and then either moving on to something else or finding a more interesting response to share. More on that here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Also, please don't use allcaps for emphasis and please don't go on about downvotes. These things are all in the site guidelines—would you please review them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and stick to the rules when posting here? We'd appreciate it, because we're trying to avoid the internet hell in which everything becomes consumed by the never-ending flamewars.
I wonder if perhaps this opinion of Feynman as a showman has gotten more popular over the decades as Feynman and the physicists who knew him passed away, and more and more of us are exposed to him only through his lectures and books. (If you'll excuse an aside: a bit like Bill Simmon's thesis on the basketball greats Bill Russell vs. Chamberlain -- those of us looking back on history, with only artifacts, may draw conclusions that would be ridiculous at the time.) I don't know if this is the case, but it's a fun speculation.
Freeman Dyson, one of Feynman's closest friends (and a prodigious scientist in his own right; died last year) regularly described Feynman as a "fast calculator rather than a particularly deep thinker".
IIRC Dyson picked Fermi as the greatest physicist he'd ever met – much to the dismay of reporters, who of course expected Dyson to name his buddy Feynman :-)
''' “When Dyson met Fermi, he quickly put aside the graphs he was being shown indicating agreement between theory and experiment.
His verdict, as Dyson remembered, was “There are two ways of doing calculations in theoretical physics. One way, and this is the way I prefer, is to have a clear physical picture of the process you are calculating. The other way is to have a precise and self-consistent mathematical formalism. You have neither.”
When a stunned Dyson tried to counter by emphasizing the agreement between experiment and the calculations, Fermi asked him how many free parameters he had used to obtain the fit. Smiling after being told “Four,” Fermi remarked, “I remember my old friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” There was little to add.” '''
[1] Segre G., Hoerlin B. The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age. Henry Holt and Co, 2016 ISBN 9781627790055
This quote is from Oliver Consa's 2020 paper: "Something is rotten in the state of QED".
> I remember the very first time I met [Pauli] at a conference in Zurich. He was talking with a whole group of people about Julian Schwinger, who had just come to Switzerland. Schwinger was a brilliant young American who had done some very fine work. He was a rival of Feynman; they were the two geniuses then. Pauli was saying that Schwinger told us all this stuff that actually made sense, not like that nonsense Dyson has been writing. At that point I came walking up with a friend of mine, Markus Fierz, who was also a Swiss scientist. With a twinkle in his eye, Fierz came up to Pauli and said, “Please allow me to introduce you to my friend, Freeman Dyson.” Pauli said, “Oh that doesn’t matter. He doesn’t understand German.” Which of course I did. That was a good beginning and we were friends right from the very first day.
[0] https://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/my-life-with-the-physics-d...
HN is therefore likely a good place to remind people of such...
"Feynman looked up that paper and expanded on it", yes, science doesn't happen in a vacuum? Standing on the shoulders of giants etc
On the other hand, as a child I have enjoyed very much the Feynman Lectures on Physics, much more than most other similar books.
I am certainly very grateful to him, because his work had a very positive influence on me, when I was young.
He had great teaching ability. That justifies his fame. Just like Gilbert Strang deserves his fame.
You should not neglect the role of politics and presentation in academia.
As science became increasingly a valuable commodity, it attracted a lot of people with perverse incentives: politicians, administrators, research managers, status-hungry individuals etc. I see what’s happening and it’s not pretty.
Frankly, I think it’s not a healthy environment and this academic system would not last too long. Smart people will leave, as they realize this has become an industry not different from banking or any other, except the currency is fame and reputation, and stakes are so low. It’s no longer like 1930s, and people like Feynman helped set the stage for a new eta.
And it’s not surprising at all, once you learn that politics and showmanship actually pay off.
Being a showman doesn't mean that Feynman was only a showman. Indeed, one can hardly be an effective educator without a strong touch of showmanship in presenting ideas.
He also drew useful diagrams, but you know ... :)