Feynman's Legacy in My Head
Angela Collier posted a great (long) video about Richard Feynman, and specifically the version of Feynman that exists in the public consciousness. I'm not going to crib or spoil her notes on this, she has a far more insightful and well-researched set of opinions than I'm capable of writing all this off the top of my head, but while watching I was really intrigued by how it mirrored and differed from my own view of Feynman over the last couple decades based on the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!"
Early on Angela discusses how if you're a young American with an interest in physics, some adult will eventually encourage you to read Surely You're Joking because it's the only point of reference they have for "entertaining physics stuff". She was one of these young people, started reading it and thought "what an asshole" and never went back. Later she dealt with a lot of young men who loved Feynman's stories and were also massive assholes, so that view stuck. A big theme of this section is that stories of Feynman's misogyny - harrassing women, embarrassing a waitress, etc - are the ones that stuck. What I find interesting is that they're not what stuck for me.
A little background, I was a Physics student myself - not American, but online enough that Feynman was someone I was aware of as a character, such that I read Surely You're Joking when I was 16 or so. The various stories of him being a dipshit to and about women didn't really stay in my mind after reading- I was something of a dipshit myself, as a teenager, but not enough so that I thought they were cool - so my view on the man wasn't quite so dim, but it also wasn't pure admiration like is common. It's also worth noting that I was a pretty shitty student, so I also don't have a full appreciation for the man's work as a theorist.
For all the anecdotes in the book, only 2 really stayed in my mind after reading, enough that they're what I think of when I think of Feynman. I'm purposely not re-reading them to verify because I want this to be about my impressions of him, not a measurable truth.
The first is about his time at Los Alamos, where they were developing the atomic bomb, and his experience of finding that untrained maintenance people were storing waste in a potentially catastrophically dangerous way. As I recall, they were stacking things close together in a way that could potentially cause a meltdown. Crucially, these folks had no training or understanding of nuclear waste, didn't know that's what they were dealing with, and didn't know that Los Alamos was even working on such things - as far as they were concerned, this was just rubbish to be stored. I think his main point in telling this story was about how unfair it was to expect them to do better without proper information, and that the secrecy of the Manhattan Project was putting them in serious danger. I liked this story - it paints Feynman as quite aware of the people around him, and of his position in the machine he's operating. That even as a theoretical physicist, his work was putting real people in practical danger. That feels like a good lesson.
The second was about how, during one summer at college, he asked to intern-or-whatever in another department, Biology I think. While there he was basically a lab-assistant, helping with their work and learning how they do things. In this he spent most of his time handling test-tubes, and in doing so he became very adept at uncapping them one-handed, and jokes that because of that he gets to save a little bit of time every day when he brushes his teeth, because he can uncap and re-cap his toothpaste with one hand. I'm sure he had more to say about it, but that's what stuck with me. I think what he's getting at here is that if he had always been Physics-Physics-Physics, he'd never have learned this silly little thing that he enjoys and benefits from, and you should always be ready to broaden your horizons.
I'll be honest, I hated this story. It felt incredibly silly, and I was a Big Theory Boy so why would I want to spend that much time in a lab? This was a really silly view, but I was a teenager. Then I went to university, this story still rolling about in my mind, and I got a new negative insight: what kind of biology lab is letting a physics student get this valuable lab experience over one of their own students? It's simple, a 1930s lab. That's when it really clicked for me. Feynman's life lessons barely applied because he went to college in a completely different universe, where just going to university already made you an extreme outlier. You were worthy of the university's time simply because you were there. This isn't to say Feynman wasn't an incredible talent, but it just felt like the bar was immensely higher in the post-2008 era. I was seeing UK tuition fees quintuple for my younger friends, and a huge number of my peers were getting a degree out of necessity rather than passion. As students in we were gristle in the university machine, competition was fierce, and the expectation was that we'd get our 2:1 and fuck off.
To be clear, as I said I was a terrible student. Classic "gifted child doesn't know how to study" shit. Between anxiety, depression, and a life-threatening infection my motivation for academia waned hugely over time. I don't know that it'd be any different if degrees "meant more", whatever that means, but I do wonder if things might have gone differently if I had been born into the pre-inflationary era of academia. I was certainly born for higher education, extremely likely in any era to have studied for a Maths or Physics degree, so maybe I'd be an academic in the 30s?
Of course, in the 1930s I wouldn't have spent hundreds of hours playing Super Mario 64, so that might also have helped.
Anyway, I highly recommend the acollierastro video linked above. It got me thinking a lot about things I'd taken for granted about myself despite having changed a lot since I came to believe them. A funny idea in the context of the video itself, actually.