When Feynman met Dirac (2020) (opens in new tab)

Not American, but I would argue that his greatest contributions weren’t necessarily in exploring the fundamental laws of physics but in making physics more accessible, easier to understand, and more pleasant to study.

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.

If only. Dirac and Wiener did not understand the significance of the action appearing where it did. Feynman gave it meaning. An analogy for what you are saying is that Einstein just rederived Lorentz’s equations. That’s one of the most interesting characteristics of physics, it’s not just math and computation, meaning is hugely significant.

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@).

Oppenheimer's opinion of Feynman seems to have vastly diminished after the Shelter Island and Pocono conferences. According to Dyson [1]:

“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".

I have several friends who personally knew Feynman. He was a problematic individual in many ways. One of them remembers being in an elevator with his girlfriend, and Feynman getting on the elevator and immediately hitting on her. Another recalls being dragged along to crash parties at Caltech for free food. That same one commented that, yes, he was super careful about his legacy and all the stories published about him.

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.

Although I wasn't around during the 50s, this comment seems likely to be revisionist history to me. The article itself quotes Oppenheimer as writing (unsolicited): "He is by all odds the most brilliant young physicist here, and everyone knows this." and 'Wigner said, "He is a second Dirac, only this time human."'

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.

Your assessment, while phrased provocatively, isn't all that controversial (except maybe in some pop-sci worship circles). Feynman shone in popularizing physics, and physicists.

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 :-)

I would say its not a very popular comment because its deliberately contrarian and not the full story. Yes, Feynman was a showman (amongst many other things) but he was also a truly gifted physicist. You can be both those things at the same time. And he was.

"Feynman looked up that paper and expanded on it", yes, science doesn't happen in a vacuum? Standing on the shoulders of giants etc

I agree that his original contributions might not be so important as believed by those who actually do not know them in detail.

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 was definitely a showman, but Schwinger and Tomonaga were definitely not. Being a larger-than-life character type does not detract from his contributions.

Murray Gell-Mann talks about Richard Feynman

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

This comment may be unpopular because it's not tremendously useful.

Feynman was a showman but he was also a good physicist. Not among top 10 or 20 in the 20th century as many popular polls put him, but still really good physicist.

He had great teaching ability. That justifies his fame. Just like Gilbert Strang deserves his fame.

So he was awarded the Nobel Prize for being a "showman"?

There were many attention grabbing things (Cold War escalation, civil unrest, etc.) in the world when Feynman wrote those papers. I can't find the exact clip, but I remember seeing an interview where an older Feynman reflected on that time. He described a sense of hopelessness and impending doom hanging over him for years after his involvement with the Manhattan Project. Here's a similar quote to that effect[1]:

  ...I can't understand it anymore but I felt very strongly then. I'd sat in a restaurant in New York, for example and I looked at the buildings and how far away, I would think, you know, how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. How far down there was down to 34th Street? All these buildings, all smashed, and so on. And I got a very strange feeling. I would go along and I would see people building a bridge. Or, they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things, it's so useless?

Our times are certainly challenging, but I hope we can muster the strength and focus to keep building as others did in the past.

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=WO9D_BaDDhkC&pg=PA91&lpg=P...

You should read deep work. It's had a profound impact on how I consume social media.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work

Behaviors related to smartphones, email, social media etc should be evaluated by their holistic impact on our life In the same way we do with alcohol, drug use, and other addictive behaviors.

The effect it's had on my state of mind is profoundly positive. I don't even hear notifications anymore and I am far more productive.

Nitpick worth exploring on your valid point about our times: while stress can definitely be disruptive to deep cognitive work, it's a very different neuro/physiological processes than attention/focus (as you say: "attention grabbing world")

One can be quite relaxed but not at all focused and vice versa.

As a physicist, I would say that physics is still and will always be beautiful and fascinating, but I also believe that biology is where it is happening now.

Why not computer science?

It might be more interesting to read a different Feynman biography. I read Genius first, then Mehra's The Beat of a Different Drum: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, which I liked better.

It's my favorite work of nonfiction.

Not a biography, but a collection of memorial articles and reminisces:

https://www.elsevier.com/books/landau-the-physicist-and-the-...

Also, I found the autobiography by Sagdeev (one of the <50 who finished the "Theoretical Minimum" of Landau) to have some nice anecdotes about Landau:

Roald Sagdeev, "The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space"

The site is hosted on medium. I doubt that it can be hugged to death?

one anecdote about Dirac. Dirac and Heisenberg discussed about religion. They involved Pauli in the discussion and Pauli summed up Dirac's point of view: "“Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.)"

It is impressive.

To add information, Jørgen's Cantor Paradise is a paid subscription (a very good one) with occasional free articles. So what you identify as a prolific submission history can also identified by others, as self-marketing.