My last boss had Feynman as his physics professor at Caltech. I had read most of Feynman non-physics books and some physics books. When he found out my interest in Feynman, we used to have interesting talk about him over lunch, mostly him talking about Feynman lectures.
That makes me wonder what could we be doing now that we're not? The time now is just like the time when you were in the lecture at Caltech. I kind of wish we had recorded more of Steve Jobs and wish he was more open for university lectures/presentations. This is their legacy and although we document their story, nothing quite beats audio/video of their own self - as they express grand ideas.
We are still throwing away massive amounts of historical data every day simply because it isn't in any corporation's financial interests to keep it. Efforts like the internet archive have very recently gained steam and are nowhere near enough.
Although I don't really consider a lot of what we (programmers) do engineering, it does make me happy that we do is documented reasonably thoroughly if it's open source.
There's so much brilliant work of the past only accessible in either archives or spoken word, whereas code can at least be preserved as-is.
There's a potential subset of people who don't know who Richard Feynman is, but might recognise a segment of one his lectures from the movie theatre puzzle in The Witness (the 2016 video game by Jonathan Blow).
I bought The Witness (the PC version) a couple of years ago, even though it's not a game that I'm inclined to try to play (and I might not even be able to play it). I bought it partly because I was inordinately curious about superficial packaging details like whether or to what extent dynamic linking would be used, how assets would be bundled, and whether they would be obfuscated so they couldn't be viewed or played outside the game. But I also bought it because I knew it had some interesting audio and video recordings, like a recording of Brian Moriarty's lecture "The Secret of Psalm 46". Anyway, I found the audio of that Feynman clip you referenced, and it was indeed playable outside the game, in an ordinary audio player. Now I'm curious about this movie theatre puzzle and the significance of the Feynman clip in the context of the game.
It's not a game for everyone, but I'd suggest giving it a reasonably serious try if you're curious. It's by far my favorite puzzle game, and I generally do not like puzzle games.
I played through it with a local retro gaming group over a series of sessions. That made it a lot more relaxed and fun, as we could share the mental load when getting a big fatigued. Most of it we could figure out through simple intuition, persistence, observation, etc, but there is one puzzle at the end that we hand to resort to pen and paper, coming up with a formalism for it.
I thought it would be nice to listen to these with my podcast player on iphone. Here's my too-complicated process that worked:
- in Chrome inspector, look at the network tab when you click play on a Feynman lecture. Right click the mp4 and do "copy as cURL".
- Go to command line (unix style) and paste. Then append to that command line something like "--output flp1.mp4". That will download the file locally with that file name.
- Put the file on Dropbox or something that will get it to your phone.
- From dropbox on iphone, share and export the file, then choose your podcast app. The podcast app that worked for me is "Pocket Casts".
- Now in Pocket Casts -> Profile -> Files, you should be able to play the mp4s with nice podcast-style controls and learn physics and be happy!
Nice, I tried doing the same, but by writing the curl command myself. It failed, it seems it requires ~the cookies~ because I was getting 403s. Thanks for the better idea!
Edit: Looks like all it needed was the Referrer header.
Feynman started fixing radios and antennas as a kid.
During the Great Depression, people did not have enough money to hire a radio repairman, so they hired him instead. He started taking incrementally more difficult jobs, until he got very skilled at it.
Another cool fact about Feynman is that he had some built-in syntax highlighting for equations in his head. A very specific type of a condition known as grapheme-color synesthesia.
Feynman used to think about the problem before doing anything, so his neighbor asked him why he wasn't working on the radio but standing there staring off into space. After Feynman fixed his radio, his neighbor told everyone in amazement "He fixes radios by thinking!" You could take this to mean he thinks about the problem first, but I think the neighbor (this was in late 1920's, early 1930's) meant that he was was amazed because Feynman appeared to reach into the radio with his mind to fix it.
I dug through Apple’s audio book section at some length and purchased Feynman’s overall survey of math, a sort of toss-off in the middle of his physics lecture series, and I love it. It’s just the most profoundly enthusiastic holistic summary of basic mathematics I can imagine packed into a one hour talk. I’m going to listen to it again today.
The pleasure of these lectures is getting to spend a little time in Feynman’s head, appreciating the world the way he does, unpacking it the way he does. I don’t think they deserve the side eye - they’re a really unique product of a very unique person, and a culturally valuable thing to have around.
My theory is something I call "The Feynman effect". Feynman has a talent of making the listener believe that they (the listener) understand everything at a very deep level. So it gives the feeling he's an amazing teacher -- and if you don't actually try to apply that knowledge, you might never notice that you're wrong.
I realized that after reading his lecture on "the principle of least action" coming out with the feeling that I deeply understand (among other things) calculus of variations - a field I didn't even know existed until I read that. So I tried to use it -- and realized that, other than recreating Feynman's example, I can't really use it for anything.
I shared the sentiment with others over lunch the next day (a couple of other undergrads and two graduate students), and they were all familiar with that feeling....
I interviewed a Caltech grad for a job once. She was completely qualified (overqualified?) and I figured that out in all of about 3 minutes. So I asked her if she'd taken Feynman. She smiled and said she'd sat in on a seminar where he lectured and, similar to your Feynman effect, she said that he had the ability to take the most complicated idea, crystalize it, explain it and that you would understand it. This effect lasted for about 5 minutes after which you would confuse yourself.
BTW, she didn't get the job which was not my doing. My boss was a woman who felt threatened by having another woman who was massively smarter than she was.
As for Feynman, I'm more than ok with his lectures. Clarity is no substitute for application but it damn well helps application.
I wish I could frame this comment for every first-year student. The profound irony of the Feynman Lectures is that although they are revered as master works, the whole endeavor was a miserable failure.
Feynman was teaching an intro sequence, and he delivered a lovely set of lectures that grad students and professors enjoyed. We still give newly minted physics majors a lovely bound copy of the Lectures, because some of us are in on the joke.
It depends on a person. For me the lectures deserve all the praise they've got and more.
I've read Feynman lectures twice. First time in the secondary school -- it was above my head but it gave me an understanding, the right models to work with later. The second time I read it in the university after I'd already studied the topics by other means (through complex math using e.g., Landau and Lifshitz textbooks). Now, I could appropriate the full depth of the lectures.
It is often useful to have several perspectives on a subject , to know it better in particular to solve complex problems (the more tools you can apply, the better).
The point of lecture is not to teach you the subject throughly. That’s what practice is for. The point of lecture is to get you so profoundly interested in the concepts you’re learning that you’ll go and do the practice without feeling like you’re doing any work.
Happens in other fields too.
When I worked at Tera, I (and plenty of others) would talk to Burton Smith in the halls.
Whatever the topic, he always made us feel included and smart.
Then, after the conversation, as we moved apart, our IQ would drop and our understanding would fail.
Susskind is great, and he's very much inspired by Feynman.
Of course there are plenty of good professors that will help you understand physics, but I haven't heard anyone lecture in such an interesting way, have you?
I really wanted to follow this class taught by Steven Pinker [1] recently, but the audio becomes so bad after the first lecture that it's almost impossible to follow. It made me also think that there could probably be some interesting post-processing applied, to improve the quality.
Readit News
Feynman gave a guest lecture to our freshman Physics class about potato chip worlds. I wish someone recorded it.
It simply never occurred to me, or apparently anyone else, even though those portable Radio Shack cassette recorders were around.
There's so much brilliant work of the past only accessible in either archives or spoken word, whereas code can at least be preserved as-is.
Go on...
The point was how your perspective could hide your world's true nature.
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/fml.html#5
(The section clipped in The Witness begins at 38 minutes, 34 seconds.)
I played through it with a local retro gaming group over a series of sessions. That made it a lot more relaxed and fun, as we could share the mental load when getting a big fatigued. Most of it we could figure out through simple intuition, persistence, observation, etc, but there is one puzzle at the end that we hand to resort to pen and paper, coming up with a formalism for it.
All in all it was a really cool experience.
- in Chrome inspector, look at the network tab when you click play on a Feynman lecture. Right click the mp4 and do "copy as cURL".
- Go to command line (unix style) and paste. Then append to that command line something like "--output flp1.mp4". That will download the file locally with that file name.
- Put the file on Dropbox or something that will get it to your phone.
- From dropbox on iphone, share and export the file, then choose your podcast app. The podcast app that worked for me is "Pocket Casts".
- Now in Pocket Casts -> Profile -> Files, you should be able to play the mp4s with nice podcast-style controls and learn physics and be happy!
Required 'brew install wget' first for me. ;-)
Edit: Looks like all it needed was the Referrer header.
During the Great Depression, people did not have enough money to hire a radio repairman, so they hired him instead. He started taking incrementally more difficult jobs, until he got very skilled at it.
Another cool fact about Feynman is that he had some built-in syntax highlighting for equations in his head. A very specific type of a condition known as grapheme-color synesthesia.
I think being exposed to early electronics (before transistors) must have been an incredible learning experience for a kid.
I dug through Apple’s audio book section at some length and purchased Feynman’s overall survey of math, a sort of toss-off in the middle of his physics lecture series, and I love it. It’s just the most profoundly enthusiastic holistic summary of basic mathematics I can imagine packed into a one hour talk. I’m going to listen to it again today.
The pleasure of these lectures is getting to spend a little time in Feynman’s head, appreciating the world the way he does, unpacking it the way he does. I don’t think they deserve the side eye - they’re a really unique product of a very unique person, and a culturally valuable thing to have around.
I realized that after reading his lecture on "the principle of least action" coming out with the feeling that I deeply understand (among other things) calculus of variations - a field I didn't even know existed until I read that. So I tried to use it -- and realized that, other than recreating Feynman's example, I can't really use it for anything.
I shared the sentiment with others over lunch the next day (a couple of other undergrads and two graduate students), and they were all familiar with that feeling....
BTW, she didn't get the job which was not my doing. My boss was a woman who felt threatened by having another woman who was massively smarter than she was.
As for Feynman, I'm more than ok with his lectures. Clarity is no substitute for application but it damn well helps application.
Feynman was teaching an intro sequence, and he delivered a lovely set of lectures that grad students and professors enjoyed. We still give newly minted physics majors a lovely bound copy of the Lectures, because some of us are in on the joke.
I've read Feynman lectures twice. First time in the secondary school -- it was above my head but it gave me an understanding, the right models to work with later. The second time I read it in the university after I'd already studied the topics by other means (through complex math using e.g., Landau and Lifshitz textbooks). Now, I could appropriate the full depth of the lectures.
It is often useful to have several perspectives on a subject , to know it better in particular to solve complex problems (the more tools you can apply, the better).
Interestingly, "false understanding" by lay people seems more common in physics than perhaps any other field I am familiar with.
Except maybe some of it stuck. Hope so.
His 'Meaning as Structure of Modern Physics' is as good an resource for freshman physics as Feynman lectures.
Also there are topics Feyman himself thought was covered hastily, if I recollect correctly, and that included thermodynamics.
Of course there are plenty of good professors that will help you understand physics, but I haven't heard anyone lecture in such an interesting way, have you?
They are really more Feynman memorabilia and nerd status objects than used as educational resources, similar to TAOCP
[1] https://stevenpinker.com/classes/psychological-science-scien...