Feynman: making the extraordinary look easy

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/feynman-making-the-extraordinary-look-easy/

by samclemens • 6 years ago

87 46 6 years ago

the-tls.co.uk

hyperman12• 6 years ago

What is 'sometimes sexist attitudes' doing there? I've read his memoirs and his lectures, and I saw some of his challenger stuff on youtube. I dont really see this.

Now he lived in a more sexist culture than we do, so maybe that has something to do with it?

mathgenius• 6 years ago

I need to see other sources for this apart from his own memoirs. Otherwise this is just "boy talk" and very likely has nothing to do with reality.

watwut2• 6 years ago

Simultaneously you acknowledge that sexism existed and simultaneously you want to make it taboo. It is not personal offence to you that sexism existed or exist nor something outrageous to talk about it.

This is how he is characterized:

known for his [...], sexism along with generous support for women academicians

But to answer the question, the reason for this to not make it taboo is simple - it is part of history and world. When you make it taboo, people end up having naive simplistic ideas over how world worked back then.

gjm112• 6 years ago

Why do you say that hyperman1 "want[s] to make it taboo"? I don't see that at all. I think he[1] is just saying: the article says Feynman was sexist, but I haven't seen evidence of that and find it hard to believe.

For what it's worth, I think it's clear that Feynman was, at the very least, what-we-nowadays-tend-to-call-sexist. That is, he saw women as sex objects and talked about them as sex objects, and so far as I can tell saw nothing wrong or improper about doing that. See, e.g., That Chapter of "Surely you're joking...", a bit of which is quoted in the article. (The article's decontextualization makes it look worse than it actually is, but it's still not great.) It's harder to tell whether he was sexist in the narrower sense of thinking that women are generally e.g. intellectually inferior to men. I'm pretty sure he wasn't sexist in the even narrower sense of thinking that women simply can't do the things that traditionally used to be men's jobs.

[1] Making a guess on the basis of username.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 6 years ago

Didn't you know? Everyone living more than 40 years ago is a racist, sexist, homophobic, neanderthal.

deanCommie4• 6 years ago

The truth is out there and easy to find. He was an incredible man, and a personal hero of mine. But... https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/richard-feynman-physica...

codesections• 6 years ago

The article quotes Feynman's memoirs is a highly misleading way. It says:

Such behavior is chronicled in a notorious chapter of his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (“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”).

This suggests that the attitude discussed was how Feynman thought about woman. However, the chapter is about trying out that attitude as a temporary experiment — and Feynman quickly rejects the approach precisely because is feels too sexist/dehumanizing (iirc, it's been a while since I read the source).

None of that is to disagree with the article's overall point – I don't have an informed opinion on the matter. But I did find that quote a bit misleading.

kick2• 6 years ago

Feynman definitely had some undesirable features, and he probably should if nothing else be re-examined as the poster boy for American science, but yeah, most articles criticizing him seem to be from people who haven't read anything he wrote.

There was an interesting article in The Baffler a little while ago on his polarizing history and personal views. I don't really agree with the conclusions it came to (it was very much of the position that he was undeniably irredeemably awful), but it was really the first long-form critique of him that seemed like it actually was familiar with the target, and has really been something I've thought about every time I've seen Feynman mentioned since, in any context.

cycomanic• 6 years ago

I don't know if you meant to suggest this article falls under "most articles criticizing him seem to be from people who haven't read anything he wrote.", it certainly gives the impression.

It should be noted that the author literally wrote a book about Feynman, so definitely would have read a ton of his work.

forgot_my_pwd• 6 years ago

“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”

Who hasn't said something of this sort or spirit at one time or another. Both men and women. Even if it wasn't part of some thought experiment, it's an irrelevant anecdote...

kaesar14• 6 years ago

"I adopted the attitude that those bar boys are all assholes, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get in your pants, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing"

it's universal i think

archsurface• 6 years ago

"bar girls" != "woman" (sic).

djaque2• 6 years ago

Taking a look back at the book, I think you're right. They are misrepresenting him in this one quote. He was referring to the gross mindset he was trying out.

On the other hand, I'm in one of the departments Feynman had an appointment with for a few years. Some of the older faculty overlapped with him and have fun stories to share. However, one of the lasting memories of his stay was how he was predatory towards the undergraduate women. In fact, it was to the point that some people speculate that he was forced to the leave the department after sleeping with too many of his students.

I still look up to Feynman for his science, but there were some real problems with how he treated women. Even if the article didn't do a great job of presenting the evidence for it. Besides Surely you're Joking is Feynman as portrayed by Feynman. He's famously a showman and isn't going to create an image of himself in the book that he doesn't think is likeable. Interestingly, from what I remember reading, he also did a lot to support the female scientists in his life including his sister.

ramraj07• 6 years ago

Is there any evidence or reporting to this end? This seems quite the fact (other than him choking his wife) and would love to learn more about.

known• 6 years ago

twitter.com/ProfFeynman

amelius• 6 years ago

Who would be the "Feynman(s)" of our time?

kingkongjaffa• 6 years ago

One answer would be 'science is done in a much more collaborative way now' so singular titans of a field is much less of a thing.

That being said, I suspect another answer would be 'Imagine some kind of complex disaster investigation, who would the nation call on to help solve it?'

That he was brilliant and also seemingly very broad, is probably less common now along both axis simply because there's so much more stuff now in every field.

rowanG077• 6 years ago

The only person I can think of is Elon Musk. But he isn't really a scientist.

mrunkel• 6 years ago

I find this constant sniping tiresome and boring. Yes, even people with great minds are humans, with all the failings that come with it. We are almost all lonely and seeking comfort and praise.

Isn't what is remarkable about Feynman worth celebrating? Perhaps even more so because he was only a human being.

nscalf• 6 years ago

I’m so sick of these hatchet jobs on long dead people. If you are not empathetic enough to put yourself in the position of a different society, you’re probably not empathic enough to criticize a persons character. Additionally, I don’t care if he was sexist. We don’t like Feynman because he was a feminist. We like Feynman because he led the charge in scientific discovery and progress. No one is perfect.

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

And curiously no mention of the time a girlfriend faked a pregnancy, got the abortion money from him, and bought some furniture.

These folks are so selective in what they present, and the slant never changes.

cheez• 6 years ago

Man, he's lucky she just faked it.

adamsea• 6 years ago

For context, this is the _entirety_ of the portion of the article which critiques Feynman's behavior towards women. It's not even 1/5 of the article.

"In high school, though Feynman excelled in academics, he began to foster insecurities around masculinity. Later in life this would curdle into juvenile braggadocio and poisonous attitudes towards women, with him making degrading remarks about those he met, and which persisted throughout his life. Such behavior is chronicled in a notorious chapter of his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (“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”). Yet, this markedly contrasted with his unwavering respect for the many talented women he supported: starting with his sister and including his first wife Arline. He was impressed and influenced by Arline’s skills as an artist and music teacher. The marriage ended tragically early when Arline died of tuberculosis. Years later, Feynman leant valuable support to the Blake scholar Jenijoy La Belle, the first female faculty appointment at Caltech, who had been denied tenure. One of the few professors outside of the humanities who came to her defence, he published an influential letter of support in the campus newspaper, and thanks in part to this, she received tenure and enjoyed a long career."

I'm confused. The article is 90% about his career as a scientist, and is nothing but laudatory. 10%, if that, is about his relationships with women, and even the critique given there is tempered w/the observation that he had a strong and loving relationship with his wife.

So, how is this a hatchet job? Reads more like a normal biographical article.

What exactly is your critique here?

westoncb• 6 years ago

It's already been pointed out elsewhere in the comments, but the quote about "those bar girls are all bitches" is badly taken out of context, since that was something he'd said in connection with a thought experiment he was performing.

swsieber3• 6 years ago

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, don't be an ugly tourist. "

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

The only time this quote seems to be used is on blogs and forums when people are trying to convince others to stay in the Mormon church. Is that what you're quoting or is there some other origin to this phrase?

troughway• 6 years ago

I guess it's finally Feynman's turn to be roasted over the coals for some inappropriate remarks he made somewhere.

In particular, I like how TLS slid it in there as a joinder to his life's work, because it totally fits there.

Well done HN, well done.

batlamenace• 6 years ago

I'm not sure a lot of the comments here have read Feynman's memoir. As much as he was a brilliant scientist, his attitude towards women does show. That chapter is chilling, it reads like a post on an incel group.

Sure he was in a more sexist society. But the reason this still matters is that it represents the sexist culture that's still around in science today. It's not about the man it's a bigger discussion on an institution.

umvi• 6 years ago

The impression I got after reading "Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" was not that Feynman was sexist (though I did raise my eyebrows a few times), but that he laundered his vanity via manufactured anecdotes about himself. When I say manufactured, I don't mean "false", I mean he subtly (but actively) manipulated the (otherwise ordinary) situations he found himself in such that they would turn into interesting or even unbelievable anecdotes starring... well him!

I still enjoyed the book immensely, mind you, and I have no doubt some of the anecdotes were genuine, but that was the general impression I had by the end.

m4632• 6 years ago

Well, from what I've read, I think he still does it all to #1 educate and #2 entertain. (and #2 is a multiplier for #1)

I recall the story of the Oak Ridge plant, where they think he is a great Genius yet he clearly illustrates he is not.

wait, here it is:

I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there's an evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it'll explode. So they explained to me that this plant is designed so that if any one valve gets stuck nothing will happen. It needs at least two valves everywhere.

Then they explain how it works. The carbon tetrachloride comes in here, the uranium nitrate from here comes in here, it goes up and down, it goes up through the floor, comes up through the pipes, coming up from the second floor, bluuuuurp--going through the stack of blueprints, downup- down-up, talking very fast, explaining the very very complicated chemical plant.

I'm completely dazed, Worse, I don't know what the symbols on the blueprint mean! There is some kind of a thing that at first I think is a window. It's a square with a little cross in the middle, all over the damn place. I think it's a window, but no, it can't be a window, because it isn't always at the edge. I want to ask them what it is.

You must have been in a situation like this when you didn't ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now they've been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated too long. If you ask them now they'll say "What are you wasting my time all this time for?"

What am I going to do? I get an idea. Maybe it's a valve.

I take my finger and I put it down on one of the mysterious little crosses in the middle of one of the blueprints on page three, and I say "What happens if this valve gets stuck?" --figuring they're going to say "That's not a valve, sir, that's a window."

So one looks at the other and says, "Well, if that valve gets stuck--" and he goes up and down on the blueprint, up and down, the other guy goes up and down, back and forth, back and forth, and they both look at each other. They turn around to me and they open their mouths like astonished fish and say "You're absolutely right, sir."

So they rolled up the blueprints and away they went and we walked out. And Mr. Zumwalt, who had been following me all the way through, said, "You're a genius. I got the idea you were a genius when you went through the plant once and you could tell them about evaporator C-21 in building 90-207 the next morning," he says, "but what you have just done is so fantastic I want to know how, how do you do that?"

I told him you try to find out whether it's a valve or not.

So... self-aggrandizement? self-deprecating? educational? or just entertainment?

deanCommie4• 6 years ago

This is 100% accurate.

I don't understand why people on this forum are so uncomfortable when it comes to nuance about interpersonal behaviour across genders.

Feynman was a brilliant genius and educator. He also had some fucked up attitudes towards women he considered sexual targets (less so those he saw as intellectual peers). These are both facts.

The second does not negate the first. We have to understand and embrace both.

My suspicion is people get into such deep denial about it because they themselves hold indefensible positions. But recognizing problematic behaviours does not taint the entire person. Acknowledging that you have opportunities for improvements with egalitarian treatment of other genders and races does not make you a bad person. Feynman can't change - his attitudes are frozen in stone, or at least in the written word. The rest of us can though.

mistermann• 6 years ago

I don't understand why people on this forum are so uncomfortable when it comes to nuance about interpersonal behaviour across genders.

Decades of multi-channel social and psychological conditioning would be my guess, the same way most beliefs are formed within the human mind.

SNACKeR99• 6 years ago

Feynman is not known as the "Great Explainer" for nothing. It occurred to me recently that one of his great gifts was in setting the stage for the learning process. He had a knack for a visceral initial presentation of the subject matter that was going to be discussed, often with analogies to the physical world we experience. This had two main effects on the listener, 1) the feeling (whether true or not) that the subject matter was somehow going to be relatable and familiar, and 2) providing a strong central mental image around which to further hang ideas as the discussion went on, rather than staying in the realm of the abstract for a long time with no grounding point.

In this sense he was a guide, saying, "Don't worry, this is a journey we can go on together, and parts of it you have traveled before". He makes you believe you can understand something (or frankly tells us when we can't), which seems the ideal mental state for difficult subject matter.

neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.md/Ke60c

deanCommie4• 6 years ago

Despite what the other comments are saying, I think this article strikes a perfect tone, and is showing how we as a society can look at the heroes of our past and see them holistically - accolades and flaws together.

In the past there were two kinds of Feynman articles:

1) Glowing, without reservation, and notably ignoring some of his sexist views, statements, and actions

2) Conflicted and accusatory - tainting a wonderful educator and brilliant innovator as irredeemable. Someone who we should stop worshipping because of his problematic points of view.

The truth is both. And this article acknowledges and leans into it. We should strive to celebrate the best of Feynman, and apply his joy and wonder of science into our lives. But we should be aware of his more prickly and selfish aspects, and seek to not fall into the same trappings.

I think this article is great, and is a good template for approaching other flawed legends.

uep• 6 years ago

I generally agree with you, and I like that it doesn't harp on this aspect when talking about his life, but doesn't pretend it's not there either.

I am not familiar enough with Feynman's life to hold a particularly nuanced opinion, but it seems like just that one line intentionally taken out of context seems to be the issue. A one-line summary of the same chapter in the book could show that he was a womanizer without taking a particularly inflammatory quote out of context.

In an unlikely coincidence, that particular chapter of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! was one of the few that I had read.

Feynman: making the extraordinary look easy

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