Feynman: Magnets (and Why?) FUN TO IMAGINE 4/ higher quality version!

I know what you mean but this framing is dismissive. I think the larger change is that it's become a bit more acceptable in the society as a whole to acknowledge that many men we've held up on pedestals were actually flawed, or at the very least to give more credence and attention to stories told by contemporaries. In the case of Feynman, I think the way he writes about his relationship with women gives clear examples of misogyny. From an article[1] on this subject: > Among his many accomplishments, he contributed to several key conceptual breakthroughs in quantum physics, and his role in developing the field of quantum electrodynamics led to a Nobel Prize in 1965, which he shared with Julian Schwinger and Shin’ichirō Tomonaga. [...] He came off as a fun, likeable guy who just liked to do math, play pranks, and bang on the bongos. > These things are true. But it’s also true that throughout his career, Feynman reveled in blatant misogyny and sexism. In “Surely You’re Joking”, Feynman details how he adopted the mindset of a pick-up artist (an outlook he also claims to have eventually abandoned) by treating women as if they were worthless and cruelly lashing out at them when they rejected his advances. 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. Mythologizing or overly condemning figur

in “Who Smeared Feynman” · View on HN

Not quite. It was declared useless to think about precisely because physics can't answer the most fundamental question of "Why". Richard Feynman went off on an interviewer for asking "Why are they doing that?" (regarding magnetic attraction/repulsion) precisely for this reason. [0] He considers it a waste of time to consider, because you fundamentally can't make meaningful progress on the problem with our current tools and understanding, and it's possible that no amount of tools or understanding can reach the bottom-most turtle. There are some things we may simply never know. ▶ this video

in “Coincidences that make our existence possible” · View on HN

> If photon is not waving something, then it's not a wave. No, you’ve simply hit the limits of needing/wanting to understand something in terms of something else similar or more familiar. Makes the same point on a related matter: ▶ this video

in “Webb and Hubble confirm Universe's expansion rate” · View on HN

You asked the question, "Why is the hard problem a problem?" There's a documentary where someone asked Richard Feynman why magnets work, he spends almost 10 minutes talking about how a scientist assigns meaning to a question: ▶ this video "When you explain a 'Why', you have to be in some framework where you allow things to be true." So what I would say is that people generally allow Cartesian Dualism to be "true" and that's the thing that needs to be challenged. Sometimes this is called Nondualism or Nonduality. If you look at it that way, the idea that the consciousness problem is an appropriate area for inquiry seems like a straightforward idea. As far as Carl Sagan being wrong, he was big on the idea that our subjective minds are just a thing that hydrogen atoms do, if you give them billions of years to do it. But he never came out as a Strict Materialist. He also liked to poke holes in religion but never came out as an Atheist. Yes, he was being clever and cute about it. But I don't think that makes him wrong, just that he was onto something more subtle about the nature of what we are. Human beings are a way for the universe to know itself.

in “Consciousness Is Just a Feeling” · View on HN