Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.
“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.”
Interesting, he also talks about quantum computing (a first?): p. 191, "We now go on to consider how such a computer can also be built using the laws of quantum mechanics. We are going to write a Hamiltonian, for a system of interacting parts, which will behave in the same way as a large system in serving as a universal computer."
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..."
Feynman is indeed often quoted among the first people to propose the idea of a quantum computer! This talk he gave in ‘81 is among the earliest discussion of why a quantum universe requires a quantum computer to be simulated [1]:
> 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.
“There’s plenty of space at the bottom” only really took off in popularity decades later. Feynman’s accomplishments are undeniable, Nobel prize and all, but his celebrity status is given by other aspects of his personality. No Feynman equivalent I can think of is alive today. Perhaps Geoffrey Hinton and his views on the risk of AGI? He’s far from the only one of course.
I feel like the section on primality testing with Fermat's test should at least make a shout out to Carmichael numbers and that for some inputs the probability you get a false positive result is 1.
The Feynman lectures are obviously brilliant but think the computation lectures are probably a better display of Feynman's brilliance. It's quite stunning how up to date they are.
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.
The theory of computation hasn't changed a whole lot since those times - and feynman explains it very well to a laymen audience (which is what makes it great, as it's not filled with jargon).
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?
A footnote for those of the millenial or more recent persuasion: we take the full “vastness of the heavens” as given, as we’ve seen it described pretty confidently all the way back to the science books of our childhood. But cosmology, and frankly the entire field of astrophysics, is strikingly young. The idea that nebulae are in fact whole independent collections of stars, and that the observable universe is large enough to accomodate all of that, is younger than quantum mechanics and relativity both, and only got acceptance after a huge fight. The name “Big Bang” was originally a pejorative used in a similar, later fight. And so on. When Feynman said this, the idea of nebulae as galaxies was younger (~40 years) than the key idea of quarks (confinement/asymptotic freedom) is today (~50 years), and I’m guessing the latter still counts as new and arcane in your mind.
I feel uncomfortable labelling nebulae as collection of stars. The more appropriate term is stellar nursery if you want to allude to their role in star formation.
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).
Sorry, yes, there’s a terminological disconnect here: M31, say, is the “Andromeda Galaxy” to us, but the “Andromeda Nebula” to Hubble’s contemporaries circa 1920. The recognition that at least some of the cloudy (nebulous, literally) stuff in the sky is galaxies (and that the universe fits more than one) was the very point of the fight I mentioned. The world before it was thought to be drastically smaller in a way that I find difficult to think about.
That's right. Historically, nebula was anything that looked cloudy, so a lot of astrophysical objects that we now understand are distinct, were simply labelled as nebulous. M31, as you said, being a great example.
Modern astrophysics still carries the baggage of obsolete terminology to this day, from names of objects to names of units.
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
I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles approach is so different than most physics textbooks.
Self study is the best study. Out of all the bloatedness of modern education, one thing that doesnt bother me is the high cost of textbooks. High quality books and a habit of studying yourself enables you to learn high skill disciplines on the cheap.
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.
One gem if you're interested in semiconductors is the Feynman lecture "There's plenty of room at the bottom." He basically laid out the case for the modern nanotechnology age in 1959
Feynam is my hero. I have Volumes I, II, and III of his red hardbound books. His biography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, is one of my favorites.
I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").
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.
There is a book of exercises, which I've heard of but not looked at myself, titled "Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics". I don't know if that will help you but it might be worth a look.
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
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.
In one of the books he explained perfectly (to me) how to treat women at clubs in order to be respected and have attention from the gals. WORKS LIKE A CHARM despite being like 40,50 yr old boom now. ("You clearly must be joking ..." book)
His hints:
- NEVER EVER buy drinks for random gals
- Have a female companion(friend)
- Ignore them
Let's be clear about this video; the "sham legacy" is the commercialization/exploitation of Feynman's legacy after he died. Feynman was not a charlatan. Collier doesn't claim he is. She talks about the very real contributions he made. Her criticism is largely about the way people scraped together any scrap of paper he had jotted down a note on and turned it into a thin book, "Feynman on XYZ topic".
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.
Some people are (understandably) upset at the title of the video. I will summarize some of the main interesting beats in the video for those who don't want to watch this 3 hour masterpiece.
(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
It just wears thin after a while. Nobody studies Feynman to learn social skills or sexual ethics. If they did, these types of complaints would certainly be relevant... but they don't, and they aren't.
The guy invented the path integral in his PhD thesis. He invented Feynman diagrams and figured out how to do finite calculations in quantum electrodynamics. Unless you're a perfect human being, please, cut him just a tiny bit of slack.
I understand not watching a 3 hour video before leaving a comment, but this is a disrespectful reaction to a very well thought out video by a professional physicist giving a nuanced opinion about Feynman's legacy. She acknowledges many times in the video that Feynman was a great physicist who deserved his Nobel prize. The central topic of the video is dissecting his public image and the many books published under his name that he did not in fact write, including Surely You're Joking and indeed the Feynman Lectures, as well as criticizing misogynistic behaviors celebrated in those books that has left a negative impact on the culture of physics.
(And also, "cutting him a tiny bit of slack" is pretty lax language considering the behavior being criticized includes beating his wife.)
misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go.
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.
> misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture.
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.)
> 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.
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.
> misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go.
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.
I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book. From memory, he learnt the behaviour from other bar flies at the bars he hung out. And he expressed his surprise at how some women reacted. This was far from his upbringing and his experience with his fiancee.
The behaviour is hardly laudable, but "celebrated" it is not.
> I do not think Feynman was celebrating his activity in the book.
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.
This was really frustrating me. YT started recommending this channel and I could recognize the voice as an AI impersonation but had no way to know if it was at least reading something really written by Feynman. Eventually I concluded it wasn't, but there wasn't clear criteria under which I could report the channel. I'm not sure it's even against YT's TOS.
I've watched large sections of this video before, because it gets posted often. It's a 2-year-old video.
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 absolutely wrong about this. The book is based very closely on Feynman's lectures. He wrote the material and gave the lectures. Other people edited that material into book form, but Feynman did the lion's share of the work.
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.
I didn't listen to the whole thing because it's 3 hours. I would listen to it if it'd be ~30 minutes, even though I'm a bit of a Feynman fanboy, so I'm not exactly pleased by it — but, as a physicist, we have to keep an open mind :)
Based on the summary:
1. Fair points overall.
2. Of course it's embellished! I remember reading the part in Surely You're Joking when he's asked to examine some architectural blueprints, and he doesn't, and then at the meeting he randomly points to some ducts, and gets lucky because there is some major problem there. I remember when I read that 20 years ago, it felt a bit made up.
3. Of course a lot of Feynman books are not written by him! This is kindof obvious though, you go to the bookstore, there are tons of Feynman books, most were published after he died.
4. The point on Maxwell: when I learned EM, it was said that Maxwell got the credit, but a lot of that knowledge, equations were already in the air. If not Maxwell, somebody else would have written them down in a unified way. Same was said for Special Relativity.
5. The point about "Feynman bro", I don't get it. I'm a physicist (working outside the field), I'm a Feynman fanboy (or at least used to be), have a lot of Feynman/related books, and I'm definitely not a "Feynman bro". Also, I've never met anyone I would describe as a "Feynman bro". In general, I've never experienced any macho behaviour among physicists [in Eastern Europe], it's a very different crowd/vibe.
6. Lastly, I feel like this video is doing exactly what its complaining about: monetizing Feynman, using him to get views & attention.
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