Incoming links: Think different
Some of Feynman's key characteristics are:
- obsession with understanding the experiments well, see also Section "How to teach and learn physics"
- when doing more mathematical stuff, analogous obsession about starting with a concrete example and then generalizing that into the theory
- liked to teach others. At Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman for example he mentions that one key problem of the Institute for Advanced Study is that they didn't have to teach, and besides that making you feel useless when were not having new ideas, it is also the case that student's questions often inspire you to look again in some direction which sometimes happens to be profitableHe hated however mentoring others one to one, because almost everyone was too stupid for him
- interest in other natural sciences, and also random art and culture (and especially if it involves pretty women)
Some non-Physics related ones, mostly highlighted at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994):
- Feynman was a huge womanizer during a certain period of his life
- he hated pomp, going as far as seeming uneducated to some people in the way he spoke, or going out of his way to look like that. This is in stark contrast to "rivals" Murray Gell-Mann and Julian Schwinger, who were posh/snobby.
Even Apple thinks so according to their Think different campaign: www.feynman.com/fun/think-different/
quantum electrodynamics lectures:
Feynman was apparently seriously interested/amused by computer:
- Video "Los Alamos From Below by Richard Feynman (1975)" see description for the human emulator
- quantum computers as experiments that are hard to predict outcomes was first attributed to Feynman
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture (1986)
Murray Gell-Mann talks about Richard Feynman's intentional anecdote creation
. Source. TODO original interviewer, date and source. Very amusing, he tells how Feynman wouldn't brush his teeth, or purposefully forget to wear jacket and tie when going to the faculty canteen where it was required and so he would use ugly emergency jacket the canteen offered to anyone who had forgotten theirs.Murray Gell-Mann talks about Feynman's partons by Web of Stories (1997)
Source. Listener is likely this Geoffrey West. Key quote:Feynman of course, as usual, put it in a form so that the common people could use it, and experimentalists all over the world now thought they understood things because Feynman had put it in such simple language for them.
Two official websites?
- www.richardfeynman.com/ this one has clearly superior scientific information.
- www.feynman.com/
High level timeline of his life:
In 1948 he published his reworking of classical quantum mechanics in terms of the path integral formulation: journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.20.367 Space Time Approach to nonrelativistic quantum mechanics (paywalled 2021)
The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened by Super Eyepatch Wolf (2017)
Source. This interesting video essay makes the main point that the Simpsons used to be good because they mocked mainstream. But then they became mainstream, which basically defeated their purpose. Think different from Apple comes to mind.Of course, this only made sense when Apple was more of an underdog to IBM, and Ciro Santilli greatly admires their defiance of the norm.
As of 2020 however, Apple is kind of on the top of the mobile world, and Think different simply makes no sense anymore, notably because it relies on closed source offline software used by millions.
it's Popular Now It Sucks comes to mind.
This is a trap every company that prides itself on it's "alternative culture" sets for itself. If they succeed, they could become the norm.
Take on Apple's Think different logo with Tux instead of the Apple logo
. In 2020, to think different, is to think open knowledge. Work by Ciro Santilli, based on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tux.svg.
1976 Think different. 2011 Think mainstream
. Cropped from wallpapersafari.com/w/RqYUEj.