Small story about the time I read the collection Feynman's letters (I think it's a book called Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track)
The beginning of the book contained a lot of cute letters between him and his wife Arline. I was curious how much of the book would be this, considering I know she died of TB, so I flipped ahead and saw a letter to her quite a few more pages in, so I figured she must survive until at least that point. I continued reading and was emotionally caught off guard when she died only a couple of pages later. I'm not sure why I was so distraught at the death of someone I did not know who died 80 years ago, but I was looking forward to, and had the expectation of, a few more cute letters between them.
When I got to the letter that I had originally flipped to, it was the one he was writing after her death as a form of therapy to himself.
FWIW, they had a very cute relationship and the letters are worth reading for that alone.
> Marriage, however, proved to be a towering practical problem — Princeton, where Feynman was now pursuing a Ph.D., threatened to withdraw the fellowships funding his graduate studies if he were to wed, for the university considered the emotional and pragmatic responsibilities of marriage a grave threat to academic discipline.
You have got to be kidding me. And I thought academia was bad in the 21st century.
Losing his first wife was a tragedy that seems to have led Feynman down a dark personal path. Everybody likes the funny second wife divorce story - "because he did calculus all the time!"
His second wife testified in court that he flew into a rage and choked her if she unwittingly interrupted his calculus. [1] She was granted a divorce due to his "extreme cruelty."
Plenty of people lose loved ones and manage to remain decent human beings. We can admire Feynman's contributions to physics, but when it comes to personal life, he was just an asshole. There's no point in looking up to him in matters of how to love another human being. Your everyday nobody is far more inspirational in that regard.
>> ...but when it comes to personal life, he was just an asshole
I don't know about you, but physical abuse (e.g. choking his spouse if she interrupted him while he worked) goes way beyond asshole territory IMHO. We're talking about someone who was essentially an incredibly cruel, if not monstrous person.
But what generally happens with these types of things is that history tends to treat famous men very kindly and overlook or even completely erase their dark sides. That is indeed what has happened with Feynman.
A long time *ago I read re: Feynman's divorce that false accusations of abuse were common back then because no-fault divorce didn't exist. Couples that wanted a divorce would have to concoct a story in order to get a judge to sign off. I don't have strong feelings either way because it's impossible to know what really happened between them, but I found it an interesting counterpoint.
I tend to agree with "where there's smoke, there's fire," but I'm also cautious reading too much into what a single person -- in particular, an ex-lover -- has to say when forming an opinion about someone. Obviously if it's a pattern, that's another story. But I've lived through some things, and witnessed people make claims that were stronger than what was justified.
I once told my partner that there was a musician he listened to that really relished putting women down. He thought I was talking about one song, but I didn't remember enough to give details. A few weeks later, he comes back - "It's not just one song!"
He never noticed until he had the right frame of reference. It was easy to gloss over each individual instance because the songs weren't referring to him. He experienced an entirely different reality based on his perspective of existence.
There are ugly patterns in Feynman's writings about women. Not everyone has the luxury of ignoring these patterns as they read his work.
I’d say having some experience in the area that extreme grief can really affect someone in profound ways.
Not making excuses for someone whom I don’t know or understand, but the toxic soup and paranoia associated with where and the nature of his work combined with what seems to a hard loss is a recipe for the type of mental anguish that might explain some of those behaviors.
Feynman clearly did not lead an exemplary personal life but his second wife also accused him of being a communist so I'd take her testimony with a grain of salt.
Presumably, the allegations were during his second marriage. This letter was to his first wife.
If the love of my life were to be cut down in the prime of her life, I imagine I'd be emotionally scarred for life. Sure, I'd make every effort to move on, but I just can't imagine the amount of emotional scar tissue that would remain permanently.
Edit: Note that I have no opinion here, just answering someone's request for a source.
A cursory Google reveals...
> Neither were Feynman's escapades limited to bars; more than one of his biographies have documented affairs with two married women, at least one of which caused him considerable problems.[0]
Charlie Munger seems to be a source for claims that he would sleep with the wives of his undergrad students[2].
And then there are these passages[1], which appear to be from his own autobiography. This isn't necessarily cheating, but assuming that what he's written is true, they serve to make the accusations of infidelity more plausible.
> "... You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything –– not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”
>I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
>I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.”
>I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE! ... You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”
This Baffler[3] piece also focuses on this subject...
>He worked and held meetings in strip clubs, and while a professor at Cal Tech, he drew naked portraits of his female students.
>Even worse, perhaps, he pretended to be an undergraduate student to deceive younger women into sleeping with him. His second wife accused him of abuse, citing multiple occasions when he’d fly into a blind rage if she interrupted him while he was working or playing his bongos.
I’m polyamorous. Being poly involves clear communication and consent of all parties involved. It involves respect for the other people. If Feynman was sleeping with his students wives and openly denigrating women, that sounds much more like the behavior of someone cheating than the behavior of someone practicing ethical non monogamy. Remember that back then, ethical non monogamy was much less common. The foundational books on the subject came out in the late 1990’s or after, and before that people didn’t even have the language to describe and negotiate what they were doing. It was much more common for one person inclined to this behavior to just cheat.
Feynman has been a huge influence on me. His outlook on science and the world helped shape my own. But we can’t ignore the flaws of our heroes, and it really sounds like he had a dark side.
This is a good summary example of something I find distinctly dangerous about the way people think of figures they don't personally know (i.e. how people on the social web treat public figures, or even just any stranger they see on the web). We see snapshots and assemble a person in our head. We can barely do that with any degree of fidelity regarding people we personally know, much less public figures.
People do good and evil things. But a person, in virtually all cases, is not "good" or "evil". Even if Feynman was engaging in the two behaviors you are thinking of at the same time (whatever those behaviors are - I'm not commenting), it still doesn't make him some kind of paradox. It does so much damage to think like this. This false dichotomy is especially prevalent for sexual topics, because they trigger stronger emotions and push us towards our "that guy good, that guy bad" instincts.
In addition to your comment, what I find mind-boggling is how easily people swing between the two extremes of opinion: it seems every public figure must either be adored and admired, or reviled and ostracized. People (myself included, I don't exclude myself from being human!) do not want to contemplate public figures as complex individuals with dark and bright aspects. It's always all or nothing.
So Woody Allen went from being an adored auteur to someone who not only was declared guilty of a horrible crime in public opinion, but also people felt entitled to declare his cinema was never good to begin with (where were these people before Allen fell in disgrace? Nowhere. They only declared his movies trash once he fell in disgrace).
Same with Feynman. Same with Asimov. Same with Picasso. And the list goes on forever.
People cannot bear the thought that artists, scientists and public figures in general are real people, with flaws and all.
The topic here specifically is his love life. If a person I personally knew was accused of half of what Feynman has been, I'd have second thoughts about inviting them over for dinner.
If you're going to argue for a gradient of perspective while assessing the character of a person there are better examples than Feynman.
How about we do away with speculating on the personal lives of public figures unless it is pertinent to some issue? So much judgement and pedestal-making.
But people will keep lopsidedly downvoting when someone veers towards the judgement-side. As if putting people on pedestals is any better.
When you take their actions and consider them as a whole, it clearly paints some as good or evil. Sure, no one is movie villain evil or saint-level good, but when a preponderance of their actions have outcomes that are bad for others, then I think it's pretty clear who they are.
I find the best antidote for this unfortunate way of thinking is imagining the individual passing gas. It's impossible to not see someone as human when they are farting.
I don't think this term is appropriate for anyone who is less than an attempted rapist.
There are many existing words to describe Feynman's behavior. Pervert, philanderer womanizer, consummate cheater.... Let's use existing words that lead to the correct assumptions by those unfamiliar with his sexual behaviors.
A sexual predator evokes Harvey Weinstein. AFAIK, Feynman sounds more like an 80s rock-star, and all the positive + negative behaviors associated with that stereotype.
I dunno, a lot of those 80s rock stars slept with their underage groupies. Harvey Weinstein used his power to pressure young Hollywood actresses, am I supposed to believe that a professor sleeping with his students is a completely different beast?
I still think Harvey Weinstein is worse, like you say, but I think it's disingenuous to pretend like they're completely different types of people.
As I recall, they married quite young and the womanizing didn’t come until he was older. The optimist in me wants to believe that if Arline had not died, the womanizing wouldn’t have happened. Feynman was a brilliant man but it was clear that losing his wife shook him. Perhaps the womanizing was a consequence of that.
It certainly doesn’t excuse any behavior of his, but perhaps it explains it.
> Feynman was a brilliant man but it was clear that losing his wife shook him. Perhaps the womanizing was a consequence of that.
I'm having a hard time imagining how the cause you posited could conceivably lead to the effect in question. Let's also remember that when a guy "plays the field", it doesn't always have a deep story behind it! :)
It’s been easily 15 years since I read Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by by James Gleick, and probably 25 or so since I read Feynman’s own books of stories about himself. I remember lots of stories about flirtation, and very probably promiscuity, but I don’t recall sexual predation. That’s not to say it didn’t happen. I haven’t read everything there is about Feynman’s life, and I don’t remember all that I actually have read. But I do not remember predation.
He used to go to strip clubs with his sketch pad and draw the strippers. It was an effective ice breaker and relationships with the strippers outside the club are inferred.
Feynman was a successful, charismatic man with insatiable curiosities about many things. He may have caused women to do things they later regretted, but it's unlikely he forced anyone against their will.
What stories about sexual predation? That is a pretty serious accusation that most of the other people in here haven’t heard, can you please explain?
The rumors and stories from himself suggest he was very successful at dating a lot of women, who were all consensual adults. Are you talking about something else?
Those events are perfectly compatible with each other. Also, what you call sexual predation afaik was to large extend engagement in consensual casual sex. Unless there are some stories I do not know about.
It's really disappointing to see such a blatant attempt to drag someone's name through the mud. I have seen over and over again people derive pleasure from undermining respected figures, perhaps in a bid to appear more sophisticated or informed. Shame on you.
It's almost always straight white males slated for personal destruction.
The funniest was probably Marilyn Manson. These women really didn't know that he was a disgusting pervert just from seeing him, then dated him for years, complaining a decade later? Manson is an awful person and makes no attempts to hide it. No one could say to the accusers, "you really had no idea this guy was a horrible person from second one?"
If Manson can be attacked and canceled any man can be.
It's been many years since I read his memoirs but I remember feeling that he came off as a barely-sympathetic womanizer in them. He had more or less absolute control over his own portrayal of himself so I assume the truth was significantly worse.
It taints the whole “woman he loved” routine as he openly acknowledged his misogyny and objectification of women throughout his life. He can’t love women so how can he love this woman?
These stories surround virtually all successful straight men. Even Garrison Keillor, as mild mannered as they come, got taken down for it.
We are simultaneously told that women are equal to men, and yet we also are told there are male predators and womanizers who women need special protection against.
This dismisses women's sexual agency. Specifically that women may choose, consciously, to exploit their sexual attractiveness to get something from a man.
If women don't have agency, i.e. men can manipulate them into damaging sexual relationships which they are helpless to avoid, this posits women as less than equals to men, as men are expected to stand up for themselves when someone attempts to manipulate them.
Readit News
The beginning of the book contained a lot of cute letters between him and his wife Arline. I was curious how much of the book would be this, considering I know she died of TB, so I flipped ahead and saw a letter to her quite a few more pages in, so I figured she must survive until at least that point. I continued reading and was emotionally caught off guard when she died only a couple of pages later. I'm not sure why I was so distraught at the death of someone I did not know who died 80 years ago, but I was looking forward to, and had the expectation of, a few more cute letters between them.
When I got to the letter that I had originally flipped to, it was the one he was writing after her death as a form of therapy to himself.
FWIW, they had a very cute relationship and the letters are worth reading for that alone.
> PS Please excuse my not mailing this — but I don’t know your new address.
Not out of character for how I always imagined his personality.
You have got to be kidding me. And I thought academia was bad in the 21st century.
Love After Life: Richard Feynman’s Letter to His Departed Wife (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24204678 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
Richard Feynman's Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280764 - March 2019 (12 comments)
Feynman's Letter to His Wife - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10375283 - Oct 2015 (60 comments)
Richard Feynman’s Love Letter to His Wife Sixteen Months After Her Death - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7893757 - June 2014 (1 comment)
His second wife testified in court that he flew into a rage and choked her if she unwittingly interrupted his calculus. [1] She was granted a divorce due to his "extreme cruelty."
[1] p. 64-65 of FBI file - https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi...
I don't know about you, but physical abuse (e.g. choking his spouse if she interrupted him while he worked) goes way beyond asshole territory IMHO. We're talking about someone who was essentially an incredibly cruel, if not monstrous person.
But what generally happens with these types of things is that history tends to treat famous men very kindly and overlook or even completely erase their dark sides. That is indeed what has happened with Feynman.
He never noticed until he had the right frame of reference. It was easy to gloss over each individual instance because the songs weren't referring to him. He experienced an entirely different reality based on his perspective of existence.
There are ugly patterns in Feynman's writings about women. Not everyone has the luxury of ignoring these patterns as they read his work.
Not making excuses for someone whom I don’t know or understand, but the toxic soup and paranoia associated with where and the nature of his work combined with what seems to a hard loss is a recipe for the type of mental anguish that might explain some of those behaviors.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
If the love of my life were to be cut down in the prime of her life, I imagine I'd be emotionally scarred for life. Sure, I'd make every effort to move on, but I just can't imagine the amount of emotional scar tissue that would remain permanently.
https://cirosantilli.com/feynman-was-a-huge-womanizer-during...
A cursory Google reveals...
> Neither were Feynman's escapades limited to bars; more than one of his biographies have documented affairs with two married women, at least one of which caused him considerable problems.[0]
Charlie Munger seems to be a source for claims that he would sleep with the wives of his undergrad students[2].
And then there are these passages[1], which appear to be from his own autobiography. This isn't necessarily cheating, but assuming that what he's written is true, they serve to make the accusations of infidelity more plausible.
> "... You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything –– not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”
>I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
>I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.”
>I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE! ... You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”
This Baffler[3] piece also focuses on this subject...
>He worked and held meetings in strip clubs, and while a professor at Cal Tech, he drew naked portraits of his female students.
>Even worse, perhaps, he pretended to be an undergraduate student to deceive younger women into sleeping with him. His second wife accused him of abuse, citing multiple occasions when he’d fly into a blind rage if she interrupted him while he was working or playing his bongos.
[0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...
[1]https://restructure.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/sexist-feynman-...
[2]https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/richard-feynman-a-woma...
[3]https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...
Feynman has been a huge influence on me. His outlook on science and the world helped shape my own. But we can’t ignore the flaws of our heroes, and it really sounds like he had a dark side.
People do good and evil things. But a person, in virtually all cases, is not "good" or "evil". Even if Feynman was engaging in the two behaviors you are thinking of at the same time (whatever those behaviors are - I'm not commenting), it still doesn't make him some kind of paradox. It does so much damage to think like this. This false dichotomy is especially prevalent for sexual topics, because they trigger stronger emotions and push us towards our "that guy good, that guy bad" instincts.
So Woody Allen went from being an adored auteur to someone who not only was declared guilty of a horrible crime in public opinion, but also people felt entitled to declare his cinema was never good to begin with (where were these people before Allen fell in disgrace? Nowhere. They only declared his movies trash once he fell in disgrace).
Same with Feynman. Same with Asimov. Same with Picasso. And the list goes on forever.
People cannot bear the thought that artists, scientists and public figures in general are real people, with flaws and all.
If you're going to argue for a gradient of perspective while assessing the character of a person there are better examples than Feynman.
But people will keep lopsidedly downvoting when someone veers towards the judgement-side. As if putting people on pedestals is any better.
> sexual predation
I don't think this term is appropriate for anyone who is less than an attempted rapist.
There are many existing words to describe Feynman's behavior. Pervert, philanderer womanizer, consummate cheater.... Let's use existing words that lead to the correct assumptions by those unfamiliar with his sexual behaviors.
A sexual predator evokes Harvey Weinstein. AFAIK, Feynman sounds more like an 80s rock-star, and all the positive + negative behaviors associated with that stereotype.
I still think Harvey Weinstein is worse, like you say, but I think it's disingenuous to pretend like they're completely different types of people.
It certainly doesn’t excuse any behavior of his, but perhaps it explains it.
I'm having a hard time imagining how the cause you posited could conceivably lead to the effect in question. Let's also remember that when a guy "plays the field", it doesn't always have a deep story behind it! :)
Feynman was a successful, charismatic man with insatiable curiosities about many things. He may have caused women to do things they later regretted, but it's unlikely he forced anyone against their will.
The rumors and stories from himself suggest he was very successful at dating a lot of women, who were all consensual adults. Are you talking about something else?
Our puritanical culture just doesn't like it.
The funniest was probably Marilyn Manson. These women really didn't know that he was a disgusting pervert just from seeing him, then dated him for years, complaining a decade later? Manson is an awful person and makes no attempts to hide it. No one could say to the accusers, "you really had no idea this guy was a horrible person from second one?"
If Manson can be attacked and canceled any man can be.
We are simultaneously told that women are equal to men, and yet we also are told there are male predators and womanizers who women need special protection against.
This dismisses women's sexual agency. Specifically that women may choose, consciously, to exploit their sexual attractiveness to get something from a man.
If women don't have agency, i.e. men can manipulate them into damaging sexual relationships which they are helpless to avoid, this posits women as less than equals to men, as men are expected to stand up for themselves when someone attempts to manipulate them.