Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989) (opens in new tab)

For a while, I worked for a physicist who resembled Feynman in many of his beliefs and behaviors. He once told me about how he changed his writing style over time. In his early papers, he would cite poorly understood theories while assuming that the reader understood them. At that time, he was exhibiting "academic arrogance" and basically looking down upon anybody who could not understand his work. After teaching for a while, he changed his style to use well-understood terms and theories. He had realized that his papers would be more valuable if more people understood them.

We are still in touch, and have learned much from each other.

1. In academia, you need to be exact. You can't use vernacular words with many interpretations. You need to describe as precisely as possible your hypothesis, the methods you used to test it, and your results. Jargon avoids ambiguity.

2. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate it to general audiences. It's to describe, in detail, a study you performed so that others can attempt to reproduce it. The audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the same field. Communication of the results to a general audience is another matter.

My favorite is in nutrition research papers when they say something like "At 8am the subjects consumed a standardized breakfast"

Equally remarkable: there are Tinyurl links to Amazon books in the post from 17 years ago that still resolve to the books’ page on Amazon!

I mentioned this last time around [1], Tamiko Thiel worked with Feynman and Hillis at thinking machines and is responsible, amongst many other things, for how cool the CM-1 and CM-2 looked.

Also, the T-shirts! [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37688340

[2] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html

And it was designed after the T-shirt that feynman wears on one of his most known pictures [0]. BTW: there we still have a nonfunctional CM which we equipped with LEDs to put fun games on it at the CS faculty in Karlsruhe [1]

[0] https://www.tamikothiel.com/cm/cm-tshirt.html [1] https://www.teco.edu/~diener/

They were apparently influenced by the WOPR from "War Games." Danny Hillis wanted to sell into the Pentagon.

You can get a beautiful poster of it from https://www.docubyte.com/projects/guide-to-computing/ (scroll to the bottom).

I've got docubyte's poster of the PDP-7 and it's great.

The CM-5 did literally make an appearance [1] in Jurassic Park. Not the 80s, but 1993, so close.

[1] http://www.starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/jurassic_park_t...

The blinkerlights panel isn't even functional. But still cool looking .

At the computer museum in Alpharetta Georgia, none of the computers are on but the connection machine panel is on.

This story is in “surely you are joking mr. Feynman” or “what do you care what does other people think?”.

When they ask him to do something not concrete, that was his answer :) so he was preferring fetching pencils to thinking about applications of some technology…

Fantastic post (despite its age and recurring postings on HN, I had not come across it before), and this indeed is a great line.

I've met a few people who overdo this, though: they try to map everything new to a past success situation, but sometimes this is obviously a bad idea/poor match. So great people also have an internal compass that tells them "this situation is _different_."

I aspire to work with people that carry the ambition to seek such seminal events in their lives (rather than "business as usual" and finishing early), events that are worthy of serving as such reference points later. Life is short, and you only have one, so you had better not waste it.

I have no idea but I have a suspicion that Thinking Machines was a company where the most senior people had “scientist” in their title rather than “engineer.”

It’s been an unresolved topic in the Talk page for that article since 2019:

The article also states that he was "lead engineer on the Connection Machine", the main product of the company. Given that he had just graduated with a bachelor's degree and the high profile startup was filled with PhD engineers and managers with experience... it's just not possible. Possibly, he was lead engineer on WAIS. 98.13.244.125 (talk) 02:54, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

First of all, being a "kid" doesn't mean you can't engineer hardware - didn't he graduate with a degree in computer engineering? Second, lots of people have gone from hardware design at their career start and into software later. The main hardware designer of the 3DFX chips does Java stuff now.

Having looked into it, there's some circumstantial evidence that it was a variation of feynman's path integrals, which is sort of a technique for summing fields representing all of the possible pathways possible in an interaction and weighting their probabilities.

Yeah, this is a kind of calling card of the Long Now Foundation. See their landing page: "established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking"

https://longnow.org/

I'm one of today's lucky ones, and I really enjoyed the read.

I've read the story a few times before, but am thankful for the reposting because I've actually been trying to figure out how to build a quantum physics simulator and was most recently stuck on how field interactions / Feynman diagrams came into play. Lo and behold the snippet on path integrals around the lattice, from Feynman himself solving the same problem!