Richard Feynman's sister Joan's advice to him: "Imagine you're a student again"

Richard and Joan at the beach

Richard Feynman might have been the most famous Feynman of the twentieth century, but his younger sister Joan - who turned 90 a few days ago -  was no slouch. At a time when it was difficult for women to enter and thrive in science, she became a noted astrophysicist in her own right, investigating stellar nucleosynthesis and the aurora among other topics. By all accounts the two also enjoyed a warm relationship, with Richard encouraging Joan's scientific interests from an early age.

There was one time however when it was Joan who gave Richard a very valuable piece of advice for solving a thorny scientific problem, and not only did it serve him well throughout his future career, but it's also one that all of us can really benefit from. In the 1950s, during the heyday of particle physics, Feynman was at a conference in Rochester where there was word of a profoundly deep potential discovery - so-called 'parity violation'. Parity violation means that left and right are not the same, a fact that seems to go against very fundamental physical laws: for instance, in chemistry there is no a priori reason why the parity or 'handedness' of amino acids should be left instead of right, and most researchers think that the only reason we have left handed amino acids is because of an initial accident that then got perpetuated. And yet there were some unstable particles whose decay into simpler ones seemed to violate parity.

At the conference Feynman read a paper by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee, two Chinese-American physicists who had theoretically showed that parity could be violated in certain ways. At that point in time Feynman was in the middle of a kind of scientific slump. He had made his most famous, Nobel Prize winning discovery - the reformulation of quantum electrodynamics - about ten years earlier, and was looking for fresh scientific questions to ponder. Parity violation seemed exactly like the kind of bold and potentially revolutionary problem that would benefit from an unconventional mind like this. But he felt stuck. At that point Joan came to his rescue. As he writes in his memoirs,

“During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”

“No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”

I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it, thinking it was too difficult.”

And this was sound advice indeed. Feynman thought hard about parity violation, and along with his 'frenemy' Murray Gell-Mann came up with a theory of beta decay that was one of his most significant contributions to physics (it would be the only paper the two would jointly co-author). He got out of his scientific slump and went on to invent a startlingly original theory of superfluidity. But Joan's advice - for which he deeply thanked her later - was pivotal in getting him started on this path.

The advice may seem obvious, and yet it's something that we often forget once we graduate from college or graduate school and progress in our scientific careers. One of my college professors once offered another related piece of advice: "Nothing's difficult, only unfamiliar". When we are students we are used to actually studying difficult topics and walking through them line by line (perhaps because it's required for the final exam, but nonetheless!). Later somehow we seem to lose the zeal and inclination for sustained, serious study of the kind that we did as eager college students. 

What Joan was telling Richard that it's only prolonged attacks on tough subject material that can yield insights. When you don't invent something - and that applies to most things - you do have to go back to basics and try to understand it from scratch. That approach of taking everything apart and understanding it from a fresh perspective played right into the Feynman playbook; it was what had enabled him to reinvent quantum mechanics. When it came to parity violation the strategy clearly worked for him. And there is no reason why it should not work for lesser mortals. We didn't invent many things, but we can understand most things.

Big things come in little packages: How Willis Lamb's tiny measurement revolutionized 20th century physics

It's the end of World War 2. Scientists and especially physicists have spent the last four years working on military hardware, culminating in radar and the atomic bomb. Many of these talented men and women are eager to go back to their university campuses and resume normal civilian life; some of them are distraught at their role in engineering such horrific weapons and want to return to the carefree life of fundamental physics research which they knew before the war.

To reconnect the country's leading physicists with each other and with the great research problems which they left behind, the National Academy of Sciences decides to organize a series of conferences on the frontiers of physics. It's not hard to decide who should lead these conferences. Robert Oppenheimer has just led the wartime Los Alamos laboratory which produced the first nuclear weapons to high fame and glory. At Los Alamos and before at Berkeley, Oppenheimer has been widely acknowledged as the founder of the modern school of American theoretical physics and a man whose intellectual mastery of a wide array of disciplines is unmatched. It seems natural to have Oppenheimer be in charge of this post-war re-organization of physics in the country.

Oppenheimer and the National Academy of Sciences put together a list of the scientists they want to invite. Except for the famous Solvay Conferences organized in Europe during a more peaceful time, it's hard to think of another scientific gathering that attracted such an unprecedented constellation of talent. A dozen or more of the attendees have already won Nobel Prizes or would go on to win them; some for work which they would present during the conferences. The list of names is an all-star list in every respect: Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Isidor Rabi, Robert Serber, Victor Weisskopf, Edward Teller, Abraham Pais, John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and Hendrik Kramers. The meeting brings together both the new stars and the old guard (I mentioned Bohr and Dirac earlier, but as M Tucker points out in the comments section, they were present at a later conference: more on this equally interesting meeting in a future post).

Some of the participants at the Shelter Island conference:
Lamb (far left), Oppenheimer, (on arm rest) Feynman (seated
and writing) and Schwinger (second from right)

The first conference takes place in June 1947 at a tiny island called Shelter Island, situated in the jaws of the Long Island crocodile. The exclusive list of attendees gets escorted by a special police escort through major towns during their bus ride. Their selection as attendees, the cutting edge topics at the conference and Oppenheimer's leadership all make it clear that the center of physics has decidedly shifted from Europe to the United States. Shelter Island would go down in history as one of the most important conferences in the history of 20th century physics, but the participants don't quite know it yet.

One attendee in particular, a young protege of Oppenheimer's from Columbia University, is perhaps not as well known as the others: Willis Lamb. Lamb comes from a robust working class household and has obtained both his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Berkeley. Right before the war he got married to a German emigre, and as the story goes, for some time the authorities forbade him from walking on the beach and confiscated his shortwave radio for fear that he might be sympathetic with his wife's German compatriots and might try to communicate with German submarines. During the war he has worked on microwave radar with Rabi and others at Columbia. What is also perhaps not as well known is Lamb's versatility as a physicist. He is an experimental physicist now, but he got his PhD with Oppenheimer at Berkeley in the 1930s. This makes him one of the few scientists around to excel in both theoretical and experimental physics. Lamb's presence is already consequential since the participants at Shelter Island are pondering a discovery he made right after the war: a discovery important enough to be enshrined with his name - the Lamb Shift. The Lamb Shift will herald a new age in physics.

To understand the Lamb Shift, let's descend deep into the world of the atom with its electrons, protons and neutrons. Let's look at the simplest atom, hydrogen. As most of us have learnt in high school and college, electrons exist in energy levels defined by atomic orbitals. Each electron is defined by four so-called quantum numbers. In hydrogen, for the principal quantum number 2, the lone electron can exist in two orbitals defined by the secondary or angular quantum number: 2S and 2P. During the 1930s, in the heyday of quantum mechanics, the great English physicist Paul Dirac had worked out that the energy of the electron in these levels should be the same. Dirac's theory which also achieved the feat of marrying Einstein's special theory of relativity to the new quantum mechanics was the spectacular culmination of a decade of revolution in physics, a revolution led by men like Heisenberg, Bohr and Born, going back all the way to Einstein and Planck at the beginning of the century. The Dirac theory promises to be the icing on the cake of quantum mechanics, and its prediction of equivalent energies for the 2S and 2P orbitals of the hydrogen atom seems solid and indisputable.

But now, Willis Lamb has found that the two levels are different in energy by a tiny amount. It's an amount tiny enough to be undetectable except by the most sophisticated techniques and experimenters, but it causes shock waves in the world of physics and cries for an explanation. The Lamb Shift would be to quantum mechanics what the perihelion of Mercury was to astrophysics. Lamb with his background in both experimental and theoretical physics is in a unique position to measure this difference. He knows enough quantum mechanics to understand Dirac's theory of the electron. He knows enough atomic spectroscopy to understand the experimental underpinnings of the two energy levels. And, thanks to his work with microwave radar during the war, he knows enough microwave spectroscopy in particular to use microwaves to delicately probe the energies of the two levels. Microwave radiation may seem intense - it can sear your food to a crisp after all - but microwaves are actually pretty low in frequency compared to ultraviolet or visible light. By wielding them the way a surgeon wields a fine scalpel, Lamb and his graduate student Robert Retherford have probed the 2S and 2P levels of the hydrogen atom without injecting enough energetic radiation to cause other spectroscopic transitions and contaminate the experimental output. The number he gets is 1000 megahertz, a number which is a fraction of the kinds of frequencies emitted in spectroscopy and which could only have been determined by an experimenter of the first rank.

The Lamb Shift causes ripples in physics because it seems to point at physics beyond the Dirac equation. It's one of those rare, precious measurements in science which seem to inaugurate an entire field of study, a tiny, elusive number that points to great truths. In fact even during the 1930s some prescient physicists, Oppenheimer and Heisenberg among them, had suspected that the two energy levels might be different. But when they tried to calculate the actual number they started getting an absurd value for it: infinity. Nobody has bettered that result, partly because there was no experimental number to compare it with, but now at last, there is a solid reference number which the theoreticians can calibrate their calculations against. It's a rudder which they can finally use to guide the ship of their collective imagination.

The participants at the Shelter Island conference take the Lamb Shift to heart. The discussions continue into the twilight hours. Suggestions are thrown around without definite follow ups. One can sense the fomenting of a movement, but the destination is unclear. It's also clear from the conference that it's going to be the young breed of physicists who's going to crack the puzzle. First comes Julian Schwinger whose hours-long talk is like a prodigious performance by a violin virtuoso. His dazzling equations leave the attendees breathless. Then comes Richard Feynman, irreverent and colloquial with a wholly new way of looking at quantum mechanics, a language of wiggles and pictures which leaves the participants befuddled. It would take some time for his way of thinking to sink in. The proceedings of the conference are now legendary, with someone asking "What the hell should I calculate next?", Isidor Rabi asking "Who ordered that?" in response to the announcement of the muon, and Oppenheimer holding the gathering mesmerized with his splendid command over language, lightning fast mind and propensity to instantly summarize all agreements and disagreements into a concise package. And yet the Lamb Shift beckons.

It takes the resources of Hans Bethe with his unmatched ability to pound calculations into workable numbers to make the first great move; it's no wonder that years later after Bethe's death, his then promising protege Freeman Dyson called him "the supreme problem solver of the twentieth century". After the conference, Bethe astounds everyone by calculating the Lamb shift from scratch. One of his strokes of insight is to realize that even a non-relativistic calculation which ignores the effects of special relativity can give a number which is pretty damn close to the experimental value: 1040 megahertz. This requires a shift of a reference frame, so to speak, since everyone seems to have assumed that a non-relativistic calculation would be too inaccurate and unrealistic. And, as part of a Bethe story that has passed into lore, he does the calculation on the train ride home to upstate New York.

By his own account, Hans Bethe did the first calculation of
the Lamb Shift on a train ride to Schenectady in New York

Bethe's calculation energizes the physics community. It breathes life into a new technique called renormalization which gets rid of the ugly infinities plaguing pre-war calculations. It propels Feynman, Schwinger and Dyson along with Japanese physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga to put the finishing touches on their theory of quantum electrodynamics which is presented in the rest of the series of the conferences. Quantum electrodynamics reveals a magical world of so-called virtual particles such as photons that can flit in and out of existence in an eye-blink as the electron transitions between the 2S and 2P energy levels. These particles may seem to violate the conservation of energy because of their sudden appearance and disappearance, but Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as applied to energy and time ensures that one can have virtual particles existing for a definite amount of time as long as there is a finite uncertainty in the value of their energies. That uncertainty manifests itself as a difference in energy which is precisely equivalent in terms of frequency to the Lamb Shift.

The Lamb Shift achieves a flowering of theoretical physics that has not been seen since the heyday of quantum mechanics in the 1930s. Quantum electrodynamics becomes the most accurate theory of physics. It calculates the magnetic moment of the electron correctly to sixteen decimal places; later Richard Feynman famously compared this to measuring the distance between New York and New Orleans to within the width of a human hair. It uncovers a universe that is alive with virtual particles and fields; these particles even permeate an absolute vacuum and give rise to so-called vacuum energy. It gives voice to a new generation of American physicists whose descendants are still housed in the country's leading physics departments. These men and women not only develop quantum electrodynamics, but the techniques they pioneer - Feynman diagrams, renormalization, scattering matrices - are used in the development of all of particle physics in the future, culminating first in the Standard Model and finally in the discovery of the Higgs Boson seven decades later. Feynman, Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga deservedly win Nobel Prizes. The Lamb Shift and its implications of a vacuum energy even helps Stephen Hawking postulate the presence of energetic radiation from black holes.

But none of this would have been possible without Willis Lamb, the perfect incarnation of theorist and experimentalist who was present at the right place at the right time. Lamb received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1955, and spent the rest of his career at Oxford, Yale and Arizona (where he moved so that his wife could find a faculty position). He mentored other successful students and developed another highly productive career in laser physics; ironically, one of his papers in this field is cited even more extensively than the one on the Lamb Shift. He lived a long and productive life and died in 2008. But it's the Lamb Shift that will go down in history as the opening shot which inaugurated a golden age of physics. As Freeman Dyson who was one of the prime participants in that saga complimented Lamb on his 65th birthday, 

"Those years, when the Lamb shift was the central theme of physics, were golden years for all the physicists of my generation. You were the first to see that this tiny shift, so elusive and hard to measure, would clarify our thinking about particles and fields."

And that's all we are, really, particles and fields. Happy 103rd birthday, Willis Lamb.

Feynman to Wolfram: "You have to extract yourself from the organization in order to run it"

Imagine you are an ambitious scientist or entrepreneur wanting to start and run a scientific organization along the lines of your own notions of creativity and rigor. What would be the best way to do this? In a letter written in response to Wolfram Research founder Stephen Wolfram, Richard Feynman (who was on Wolfram's PhD committee at Caltech - when Wolfram was 19...) had this to say:

Feynman's point in #2 is worth noting and explains why it's not easy for someone with a scientific or technological vision to become head of their own company and why many scientists shun administration since it would mean a retreat from their favorite research; they would like to obey Feynman's admonition to have "as little technical contact with non-technical people as possible". However Wolfram himself is a happy counterexample since he was able to both conceive and run Wolfram Research and turn it into a profitable venture. The reason he could do was not only because he understood the science well but also because he was an astute entrepreneur and could understand the pulse of the market.

On a bigger note however, the point tells us why the familiar disdain that many scientists have for administrative work is also misplaced in some sense; even Feynman cannot escape noting the fact that you have to administer. It is not possible to run an industrial organization or even a purely scientific one based on technical vision alone. You must have an administrative plan that allows for few distractions and gives people the freedom they need to actually implement your vision. You should either implement this plan yourself (and risk falling into Feynman's black hole of misplaced action) or hire someone who can handle the business end without sacrificing your scientific vision. 

Most importantly though, you should hire people with a wide variety of backgrounds who still understand what you are trying to do and bring their eclectic training and enthusiasm to bear on the problem, and then you should give them complete freedom (within certain constraints and goals of course). In some sense you will be creating clones of yourself by giving them this freedom, at least as far as the scientific part of making an organization work is concerned.

Some of the best scientific and technological organizations in history were based on this model. Two that immediately come to mind are Bell Labs which famously gathered a collection of Nobel Prizes while still creating breakthrough technological innovations and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology which gathered even more Nobel Prizes for its researchers.

The most famous director of the MRC was Max Perutz, himself a Nobel Laureate whose own work in solving the structure of hemoglobin was the culmination of fifteen years of dogged effort. Perutz brought a light but sure touch to the MRC while he was director. Afternoon tea was almost de rigeur and Nobel Laureate and postdoc chatted idly at the lunch table on a daily basis. A similar model was used by Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where "tea was where we explained to each other what we did not know."

Perutz and Oppenheimer managed to implement the ideal scientific organization by minimizing that implementation. Sometimes you have to extract yourself from the organization to run it well. And if you do that you might even be able to fall madly in love with someone or something.

Letter source

Richard Feynman, sexism and changing perceptions of a scientific icon

I fell in love with Richard Feynman when I was in middle school. That is when I discovered "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" in my dad's bookshelf. For the first few hours I laughed till tears were rolling out of my eyes. This was not science, it was choice entertainment of the highest order. Whether he was fixing radios by "thinking", blowing up the physics lab at Princeton to test his thoughts on a water sprinkler experiment or cracking top-secret safes at Los Alamos for pure amusement, there was no one like Feynman. This perception was shared by almost all his colleagues and millions of Feynman fans around the world. I was hooked. 

My appreciation for Feynman's quirks continued with James Gleick's brilliant biography of him as well as the more comprehensive account by Jagdish Mehra. Gelick's biography is the most accessible and evocative; Mehra's is the most scientific and complete. I also read Feynman's more philosophical takes on everything from science to religion documented through books like "The Character of Physical Law" and "The Meaning of it All". The Feynman saga continued in college when, guided by a patient professor, a friend and I painstakingly studied chapters from "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Again, the experience was like nothing else in science that we had experienced. This was not physics, it was the physics of life. The lectures are actually not that great as a textbook in my opinion since they are quite unconventional, but you would be hard pressed to find anything comparable that really exposes you to a gut feeling for the principles of physics and its relevance to the universe around us. And unlike other texts Feynman showed you the way using colloquial, no frills language and everyday examples; he was clearly one of the earliest popularizers of science in this regard. 

By the time I got into graduate school I had thus read almost everything by or about this icon, save his technical work on quantum electrodynamics. And yet by that time cracks had begin to appear in the Feynman edifice. For one thing, I was starting to feel a little irritated by the "Feynman industry" that had sprung up about him, an industry that continued to churn out reprints of his books and CDs and DVDs of his lectures, not to mention an entire fleet of merchandise comprising Feynman t-shirts and mugs; Apple even featured him on their "Think Different" posters. That industry continues unabated, and while it has kept the Feynman legend alive, it has in fact transformed the physicist into more legend than a living and breathing man, full of human foibles and triumphs. Somewhere in the bongo playing, the safecracking and the nude sketching in topless bars is lost the real Feynman. It's an unfortunate development that has in part been engendered by Feynman himself, arising as it does from his own narration of his life as part comedy routine, part almost accidental Nobel Prize winning work. 

My first foray into taking a more critical view of Feynman came from his once arch-rival and contender for most brilliant theoretical physicist in the world, Murray Gell-Mann. Unlike many others Gell-Mann was never swayed by the Feynman legend, so he provides a good conduit through which to view the latter's personality. Although dismissing his status as some kind of a physics God, Gell-Mann genuinely admired Feynman's brilliance and originality - on this count there seems to be unanimous consensus - but his take on Feynman's personal quirks is more revealing. The main thing about Feynman that really got Gell-Mann's goat was that Feynman seemed to "spend a huge amount of time generating anecdotes about himself". Now that much would be clear to anyone who does even a perfunctory reading of "Surely You're Joking..." but Gell-Mann's opinion of Feynman seems to indicate a much more deliberate effort on Feynman's part to do this. Feynman often used to portray himself as some kind of working class city slicker thrown in the middle of distinguished, Sanskrit-quoting, tea-imbibing intellectuals at Princeton or Los Alamos, but the fact was that he relished being a contrarian among these people. A more careful reading of "Surely..." makes it clear that he got into thorny situations deliberately. One suspects that much of this was simply the result of boredom, but whatever the reason, it does give credence to Gell-Mann's observation about him trying hard to generate stories about himself. 

The deliberate generation of these stories could occasionally make Feynman appear like a jerk. A case in point concerns an anecdote when he kept the tip for a meal hidden beneath an inverted glass full of water. He wanted to illustrate to the waitress a clever way of sliding the glass over to the edge of the table, collecting the water without making it spill, and retrieving the tip. But of course he did not actually tell the waitress this; he wanted to simply play a prank so he left it to her to figure it out. The incident is actually trivial and those who would complain loudly about the poor woman having to mop up the water just to get her tip are exaggerating their case, but it does capture a central thread in the Feynman narrative, the physicist's often casual habit to inconvenience other people simply to prove a point, play a prank or conduct an experiment. He did this all his life, and a longer view of his life and career gives you the feeling that most of his colleagues put up with it not because they actually enjoyed it, but because they benefited from his brilliance too much to really bother about it. 

What started bothering me more the deeper I dug into Feynman's life was something quite different: his casual sexism. The latest insight into this comes from Lawrence Krauss's book "Quantum Man" which does a great job explaining the one thing about Feynman that should matter the most - his science. But Krauss also does not ignore the warts. What startled me the most was the fact that when he was a young, boyish looking professor at Cornell, Feynman used to pretend to be a student so he could ask undergraduate women out. I suspect that this kind of behavior on the part of a contemporary professor would almost certainly lead to harsh disciplinary action, as it should. The behavior was clearly, egregiously wrong and when I read about it my view of Feynman definitely went down a notch, and a large notch at that. Feynman's apparent sexism was also the subject of a 2009 post with a sensationalist title; the post pointed out one chapter in "Surely..." in which Feynman documented various strategies he adopted for trying to get women in bars to sleep with him. 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. 

It's not surprising to find these anecdotes disturbing and even offensive, but I believe it would also be premature and simplistic to write off Richard Feynman as "sexist" across the board. People who want to accuse him of this seem to have inadvertently cherry-picked anecdotes; the nude painting in topless bars, the portrayal of a woman in a physics lesson as a clueless airhead, the propensity to lie on the beach and watch girls. But this view of Feynman misses the big picture. While not an excuse, several of his 1950s adventures were probably related to the deep pain and insecurity caused by the death of his first wife Arlene; by almost any account the two shared a very deep and special bond. It was also during the late 40s and early 50s that Feynman was doing some of his most intense work on quantum electrodynamics, and at least a few of the situations he narrates were part of him letting off steam. 

Also importantly, while some of Feynman's utterances and actions appear sexist to modern sensibilities, it's worth noting that they were probably no different than the attitudes of a male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years, a society in which women were supposed to take care of the house and children and men were seen as the bread winners. Thus, any side of Feynman that raises our eyebrows is really an aspect of a biased American society. In addition, Feynman's ploys to pick up girls in bars were - and in fact are - probably practiced by every American male seeking companionship in bars, whether consciously or unconsciously; what made Feynman different was the fact that he actually documented his methods, and he was probably the only scientist to do so. In fact we can be thankful that society has now progressed to a stage where both genders can practice these mate-seeking strategies on almost equal terms, although the gap indicated by that "almost" deserves contemplation as an indication of the unequal bargaining power that women still have. The point though is that, whatever his actions appear like to a modern crowd, I do not think Richard Feynman was any more sexist than a typical male product of his times and culture. The fact that society in general behaved similarly to what he did of course does not excuse the things he did, but it also puts them in perspective. I think recognizing this perspective is important partly to understand how our views on sexism have changed for the better from 1950 to 2014. The encouraging development is that actions by Feynman - and male society in general - that were considered acceptable or amusing in 1950 would quite rightly cause instant outrage in 2014. We still have a long way to go before both genders achieve parity in science, but the change in attitudes is definitely encouraging. 

However the fact that simply dismissing Feynman as sexist is problematic is ascertained by this 1999 article from the MIT Tech (by a woman) which gives us a more complete picture of his views toward women. As far as we know, there is no evidence that Feynman discriminated against women in his career; the letters he writes to women in the collection of letters edited by his daughter indicate no bias. Both male and female students admired him. His sister Joan documents how he was always supportive of her own career in physics. At one point he came to the aid of a female professor filing a discrimination suit at Caltech. In addition he was a devoted husband to his first and third wife and a loving and supportive father to his daughter who in fact tried hard to get her interested in science.

The irony thus seems to be that, just like Feynman was fond of generating cherry picked anecdotes about himself, we seem to be fond of generating skewed, cherry picked anecdotes about him that accuse him of sexism. In fact most conversations about Feynman seem to center on a few select anecdotes that showcase some side of his character, whether positive or negative, and this anecdotal reading of his life is something he himself encouraged. But a more complete view of Feynman's life and career indicates otherwise. My own perceptions of Feynman have changed, and that's the way it should be. At first I idolized Feynman like many others, but over time, as a more careful reading of his life revealed some of the unseemlier sides of his character, I became aware of his flaws. While I still love his lectures and science, these flaws have affected my perception of his personality, and I am glad they did. There are things that he said or did that are clearly wrong or questionable at the very least, but we can at least be grateful that we have evolved to a stage where even the few instances of his behavior that have been documented would not be tolerated on today's college campuses and would be instantly condemned. As a man I do not now admire Feynman as much as I did before, but I am also glad to have a more complete understanding of his life and times. 

However I think it's also important that we don't make the same mistake that the "Feynman industry" has made - focus on a part of the celebrated physicist's life and ignore many others. Feynman was a brilliant physicist, Feynman was occasionally sexist - and sometimes disturbingly so - and Feynman also supported women in science. All these facts are equally true. One reason why it's interesting to explore these contradictory sides of Feynman's personality is because he is not a scientist who is usually regarded as complicated and contradictory, but the facts indicate that he was. Feynman himself did a kind of disservice by sending a few wrong messages through the recounting of his adventures, and others have performed an equal disservice by embellishing his achievements and papering over his ugly side. But knowing his emphasis on honesty and integrity in science - one ethic that does consistently shine forth from the narrative of his life - he would almost certainly want us to do better and locate the narrative of his life in a more realistic milieu. We can condemn parts of his behavior while praising his science. And we should.

This post was originally posted on Scientific American. I am no longer blogging on that network and will be writing here.