Joan Feynman has died

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/updates/feynman.cfm

by basementcat • 6 years ago

713 95 6 years ago

aps.org

ponker• 6 years ago

Incredible to see the resemblance with her brother Richard.

0xfaded• 6 years ago

Its warming to see the impact that early positive mentorship can have over the span of a lifetime.

I don't mean to say that without her brother she wouldn't have achieved great things. However, I think it's extraordinarily likely that he helped her find a passion that lead her all the way to the forefront of her field.

fs111• 6 years ago

I read "Surely your joking Mr. Feynman" a few years ago, but to this day I somehow never knew he had a sister that was an accomplished scientist.

Cilvic• 6 years ago

I'm reading it at the moment too, loving it! Maybe halfway through he hasn't mentioned her once I believe.

Edit: See below how she is mentioned.

pjc50• 6 years ago

While Richard Feynman's anecdotes are great entertainment, after a while you realise that the common theme is how great Richard Feynman is.

pistoriusp2• 6 years ago

Odd, I fondly remember him mentioning her, and how important she was as a voice of reason to him.

Update: I went looking for sources in the PDF, I've add them to the parent post. She was mentioned frequently.

I actually even recall this story about the Auroras, but I cannot remember where I've heard it.

miguelsm• 6 years ago

I found out about her through this very insightful interview recorded as a series of short videos:

[1] https://webofstories.com/play/joan.feynman/1

[2] https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oO...

FlorianRappl• 6 years ago

That is true for me as well. Read a lot of things from Richard Feynman, even saw some videos / interviews with him. Never saw him mentioning her. Maybe just an oversight.

RIP.

glaberficken• 6 years ago

Same here. I guess in a way by not mentioning her a lot in public he was protecting her from only becoming known as "Richard Feynman's sister". That way you leave the room for the other person to emerge on her own terms.

pistoriusp2• 6 years ago

Joan is mentioned frequently, she is a deep source of comfort, inspiration, and a voice of reason.

_One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was sort of unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a fatherdaughter banquet, but our father was out on the road, selling uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother (I'm nine years older, so it wasn't so crazy)._
_During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated." "No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily." I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple._
_I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit down and work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester Conference. After feeling uncomfortable and behind, now I was in;_
_Just then my sister calls from New York: "How about the 9 percent what's happened?" "I've just discovered that there's new data: 7 percent. . ." "Which way?" "I'm trying to find out. I'll call you back." I was so excited that I couldn't think. It's like when you're rushing for an airplane, and you don't know whether you're late or not, and you just can't make it, when somebody says, "It's daylight saving time!" Yes, but which way? You can't think in the excitement._

peeters• 6 years ago

_During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated." "No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily." I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple._

Can't help but think that has some relevance to programming.

sohkamyung• 6 years ago

For more on Joan Feynman, read this extract about her from the book, "A Passion For Science: Tales of Discovery and Invention". I especially liked this part:

[A] thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said OK!”

[1] https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of...

ascar• 6 years ago

Amazing read. Thank you! Inspiring how her brother encouraged her into sciences after she got completely crushed by her mother.

From the same extract:

\begin{quote}

“Women can’t do science, because their brains aren’t made for it,” Lucille Feynman declared to her eight-year-old daughter Joan. The news was a huge blow to the little girl’s ambitions which, at the time in 1935, were firmly set on following her brother Richard into a life scientific. “I remember sitting in a chair and weeping,” she recalls.

[...]

The path of Joan’s life would be changed significantly one night when Richard woke her up and told her to get dressed and follow him out into the street. He took her away from the house and the street lights and out onto a wide open golf course nearby with a big dark sky above them. “I can still remember in my mind’s eye the green lights dancing in the sky”, Joan recalls of the flickering northern lights Richard had lead her outside to witness. “He told me that it was an aurora and no one knew what caused it exactly.”

In that moment, she was hooked. And whilst the doubts about a woman’s abilities to undertake a career in science, planted in her by Lucille, remained, Joan’s interest in science continued to be fuelled by Richard’s progress through university. Before he’d left home, her brother had made a deal with her that whilst away at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), studying for his bachelor’s degree, he would answer any science question that she sent him.

“For quite a while we had a notebook which went back and forth, and he sent me a problem in maths and I sent the answer,” remembers Joan of that time. Then for her fourteenth birthday, he gave her the book ‘Astronomy’ by Robert Horace Baker. “It was a book people studied at college,” she remembers. “And he’d pasted my name in it. I was so excited.”

Somewhat daunted by the advanced level of the book, Joan wrote to Richard to ask how she should read it. He replied that she should start at the beginning and read until she didn’t understand, and then start at the beginning again. And each time she’d get a little further.

“So I did,” says Joan, “and I got a little further each time. And then one day there was a figure in the book of a spectrum and underneath it said ‘the relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms… of Stellar Atmospheres from the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’.” The caption was a revelation to Joan. Cecilia was a woman’s name, and the hyphenated family name indicated she was married. It was proof that a married woman was capable of doing science.

\end{quote}

I also find this little excerpt about how she encouraged scientific thinking in her children inspiring:

[...] Joan was determined to instil a sense of curiosity and wonder in her own children.
Her son Charles remembers one occasion when, at the age of about six, he asked her about her job as a scientist. In response Joan handed him a spoon. “Drop it on the table,” she said. Charles let it fall. “Why did it fall? Why didn’t it float up to the ceiling?” asked Joan. It had never occurred to Charles that there was a whyinvolved. “Because of gravity,” she continued. “A spoon will always fall, a hot-air balloon will always rise.” Charles dropped the spoon again and again until she made him stop. The boy had no idea what gravity was, but the idea of “why?” kept rattling around in his head.

darkwater2• 6 years ago

About this

I also find this little excerpt about how she encouraged scientific thinking in her children inspiring:

I have an almost 5yo daughter that since she was barely 2 started asked "why?" about almost anything. I promised myself that I would never leave a question unanswered, to not hinder/limit her natural curiosity. Let's see how this will turn out!

solarengineer• 6 years ago

I repeated this spoon drop experiment just now and thought about it a bit. I'm astounded by the concept of gravity, and even more so that it "weakens" as we move away from the Earth took we get to zero gravity. I've got thinking about whether I'd get captured by the Sun's gravity - after all the Earth is hurtling around the Sun - until another planet were to come by, or by chance miss getting caught in any planet's gravity and drop out of the Solar system altogether. I also just wondered what causes gravity, whether it is possible to determine and conclude that there must be no gravity at a particular point away from the Earth - all while being seated at my chair.

Sorry, this isn't directly related to the overall discussion but I got so excited by my thoughts that I wanted to share.

tima101• 6 years ago

Richard woke her up and told her to get dressed and follow him out into the street.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb6vDACwxWU

Longer version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD_XAX--Ono

throwaw4y-plate2• 6 years ago

Charles dropped the spoon again and again until she made him stop

Kids are natural scientists, heh.

munificent2• 6 years ago

And then one day there was a figure in the book of a spectrum and underneath it said ‘the relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms… of Stellar Atmospheres from the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’.” The caption was a revelation to Joan. Cecilia was a woman’s name, and the hyphenated family name indicated she was married. It was proof that a married woman was capable of doing science.

This is a great example of what people mean when they say "representation matters". Humans benefit greatly from existence proofs that people similar themselves are capable of doing X.

liuyong• 6 years ago

Glad to read that, I love the game "noticing interesting things", it could be one of my family games in the future.

DrBazza• 6 years ago

"For her fourteenth birthday, Richard gave Feynman a copy of Astronomy by Robert Horace Baker, a college-level physics text, that both taught her about physics and what was possible: Feynman credited a figure attributed to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin for proving to her that women could indeed have a career doing science."

Fun fact: the new HS2 tunnel boring machine in the UK is named after Cecilia.

Quai3• 6 years ago

Awesome woman, and a fascinating family!

I'm no expert, so excuse my ignorance: Wasn't the "origin" of auroras know long before her time? I recall reading about Kristian Birkeland's terrella experiment where he demonstrated how the earths magnetic field would "focus" particles from the sun around the poles.

Of course, this does not change the fact that she was a great scientist, and did important discoveries about aroras and astronomy in general.

aneutron3• 6 years ago

Upon reading "Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman !" and "What do you care what other people think ?", I have become somewhat of a fan of Mr. Richard Feynman. (Despite it being against his idea about idolizing people).

But throughout the two books, his relationship with his sister, Joan Feynman, was an extremely intriguing once. They were both brilliant, and they both encouraged each other.

I got the impression that he, being the person to refuse authority and conforming with the pre-established, always came back to his sister for an opinion on how to handle "mere humans". And it showed in the second part of his story about the Challenger investigation.

May she rest in piece.

xutopia• 6 years ago

Rest in *peace.

throwaw4y-plate2• 6 years ago

I don't think it would be very comfortable to rest in a null pointer.

aneutron3• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, very embarrassing mistake that's there forever now.

aborsy2• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t take those stories seriously. He spent a lot of time generating stories and anecdotes about himself.

Today a PhD student would come up with something like path integrals and would barely be granted a PhD.

Real science and showmanship are different things.

mhh__2• 6 years ago

A PhD wouldn't be granted for reformulating quantum mechanics?

Keep in mind, the Schrödinger equation was published less than 20 years prior to Feynman's PhD.

jules• 6 years ago

Perhaps, but that's not an indictment of Feynman, but an indictment of how you get a PhD nowadays. Today you get a PhD for something rigorous and technical and ultimately irrelevant compared to Feynman diagrams and path integrals.

aneutron3• 6 years ago

In life, you sometimes learn that what is mathematical or cutting edge is not always synonymous with useful or revolutionary.

"Hackers" of 1990s were just script kiddies by today's standards, because the "bar was low". That doesn't make them any less important as far as contributions go.

All in all, maybe you are right, and maybe he is somewhat of a showman. But perhaps that is what we need more. Someone who masters science but also is human.

shash• 6 years ago

Do you also want to say that Newton’s Principia is now high school physics? What was pathbreaking at one time is run of the mill now. That’s called scientific advancement...

fiftyacorn• 6 years ago

I always remember Richard having a science lab as a child and would pay his younger sister to take electric shocks

tuyguntn• 6 years ago

Is there any reading related to how their parents raise them with such a passion to science? (I believe geniuses can be raised)

dennis_jeeves• 6 years ago

I believe geniuses can be raised

I believe the opposite. Nature vs nurture thing...

Not saying that encouragement, environment etc. does not play a role, it does.

EthanHeilman• 6 years ago

What about the third opinion timing and luck.

You are exposed to the right sets of ideas at the right time and your brain through random chance happens to take a particularly fruitful paths to explore the ideas creating an exceptionally useful mental model. You have emotional preconditions that cause you to process this success in a helpful rather than a harmful way. This feeling of success and excitement causes you to spend more time daydreaming about the subject, slowing building a reservoir of powerful and useful mental patterns. Someone can daydream 10-16 hours a day for 14 years, but it is very hard to find someone that can study a subject they don't like for 8 hours a day for 5 years straight. I would argue that studying a subject is less likely to result in new ideas than day dreaming.

Due to having an environment to grow these ideas, not being run over by a car, having the money to pursue schooling, and exploring a field which is undergoing a revolution at the time you could up 'a genius'. Would anyone outside of Academic Physics know Feynman's name, if he entered Physics in 1995 when much of the low hanging fruit had already been harvested?

One could argue that Grothendieck is a counter example to this argument because he grew up in very harsh conditions that for the most part actively suppressed his learning. However I would claim Grothendieck for the luck and timing argument for four reasons:

First the trivial argument, if Grothendieck had starved to death while hiding from the Nazis as a child no one would name him as a genius.

Second, when he started college he was doing very poorly and he almost gave up, but he had mentors and an early success that enabled his later successes. What if he had gotten a cold that stopped him from that early success. It seems likely that given different friendships in college he would have dropped out and never been heard from.

Third, he was very interested in political movements and dedicated much of his life to it. However, he was not particular good at this. If he had an early success in a political tract he wrote, it likely would have led him into an area that he would not have succeeded in as much as Mathematics.

Fourth, French Mathematics at the time was undergoing a revolution because so many of the older Mathematicians had died in WW1 and WW2. This created opportunities for younger Mathematicians to rapidly advance their careers and these younger Mathematicans were critical to Grothendieck not being sidelined.

efdee• 6 years ago

Not everyone has the same potential, but a lot of potential goes to waste because it is not encouraged.

Sharlin• 6 years ago

Uh, their mother specifically told young Joan that women can't become scientists because their brains can't handle science the way men's can…

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

Yes, and look at how her father treated her. Completely different.

vikramkr• 6 years ago

Apparently, the way to raise a genius is to tell them their brains aren't capable of doing science since they don't have a Y chromosome.

Quai3• 6 years ago

If you dont mind listening to Richard himself, you can watch this pre-historic 4:3 videos on youtube; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga_7j72CVlc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjm8JeDKvdc

Quai3• 6 years ago

Or maybe more fitting for this thread, listen to Joan herself; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivxkd98mDvc

abecedarius• 6 years ago

https://slatestarcodex.com/Stuff/genius.pdf -- not that I've read it myself. There's a book review somewhere on the same site.

microtherion3• 6 years ago

It's an interesting counterpoint to some of Feynman's stories about himself.

One rather persistent theme was that he had pretty messed up ways of interacting with women, so the discussion here how he mentored his sister are a welcome further layer of nuance on that point.

mohit888• 6 years ago

Really a great read. Its a huge loss!!!

comment_ran• 6 years ago

Richard and Joan had a good father. Clearly, both of them were influenced by the father.

```

Feynman:

But my father, you see, interested me in patterns at the very beginning, and then later in things, like we would turn over stones and watch the ants carry the little white babies down deeper into the holes. We would look at worms. All the time playing — when we’d go for walks, we’d look at things all the time, and then he’d tell me about things of every kind. The stars, the bugs, geometry things, and so on. He was always telling me interesting things — the way birds fly, the way ocean waves work, or something, you see, the weather. I don’t know why, any more, but there was always talking about the world, from every angle. Not just mathematics or anything like that, but the whole business he was interested in, and he was always telling me things. So he therefore developed somehow, inside me, more or less naturally, an interest in anything rational and scientific.

...

Weiner:

That’s very interesting. Evidently your father’s influence spread.

Feynman:

She said that it was because she would overhear us talking, and then she would ask me things, and I would explain it to her. That’s what she says. It wasn’t so direct in her case.

```

kelnos• 6 years ago

It is telling, though, that Richard was directly influenced by his father, but Joan had to get that influence secondhand.

thesz• 6 years ago

What does it tell?

Joan and Richard were born 9 years apart. Richard was more interesting to his father because he was older. Being eighteen, one clearly can understand more than at nine years old.

tehjoker• 6 years ago

Pour one out for a real one. Rest in peace Joan Feynman.

rcarmo3• 6 years ago

Why is there no black bar on the site? (she may not have been in CS or tech as we know it, but...)

rcarmo3• 6 years ago

What is the point of downvoting this sort of thing? Is there no openness to discussing it?

progman32• 6 years ago

Part of the issue may be that the community doesn't know what the current rules are for activating the black bar. So it's difficult to discuss productively. I'd be surprised if there's any bad faith here. Anyone know how it works?

codezero• 6 years ago

That’s a bummer. I used to work in solar physics so met her a few times and coauthored a conference proceeding with her. She was an exceptional scientist.

MattGrommes2• 6 years ago

Feynman was married with two children and, having not secured the kind of research position she was looking for, she decided to take a break from physics to take on the role of homemaker.
The break was short-lived, as Feynman grew depressed from the drudgery of keeping a home and caring for two small children: In 1962, at the advice of a therapist, she went in search of employment

Imagine how many great minds the world lost to societal rules about women staying home and not having careers. The number of mediocre men who went out into the world when they could have stayed at home while their wife worked is mind boggling and terrible to think about.

app4soft• 6 years ago

Imagine how many great minds the world lost to societal rules about women staying home and not having careers.

Everyone has right to choose one thing between career & family.

Society should not control each person on this choice.

World not lost nothing on the result choice because invention/research never exists.

globular-toast2• 6 years ago

Eh? If you actually read what you quoted you'd see that she tried to secure a position but failed and resigned to be a homemaker. There is no indication that it was anything to do with "societal rules". If men don't succeed in getting the position they want they too take on a less favourable role because they have to.

You're really grasping at straws looking for things to be outraged by here.

microtherion3• 6 years ago

Have you considered that "societal rules" may have been the predominant reason she tried and failed to find suitable employment?

MattGrommes2• 6 years ago

Although I made the comment based on the quote about a particular woman, I was thinking more generally in my comment. The kind of feeling she had about staying home is echoed many times over by other women I'm sure.

Thank you for concern at my level of outrage but I'll be fine.

ddingus• 6 years ago

To me, this increases the value of family, the very important human work needed to help new people thrive.

Perhaps we may continue to see expansion in gender role freedom.

The human work is always there and the people who do it are often undervalued. Maybe that will change too.

lkesteloot• 6 years ago

Oh no! I _just_ finished reading James Gleick's _Genius_ this weekend, and I'm halfway through _No Ordinary Genius_ (both about Richard Feynman). The latter has many long quotes from Joan, and I was wondering just yesterday if she was still alive. She sounded pretty great. (And I highly recommend both books.)

Joan Feynman has died

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