
Joan Feynman has died - basementcat
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/updates/feynman.cfm
======
sohkamyung
For more on Joan Feynman, read this extract about her from the book, "A
Passion For Science: Tales of Discovery and Invention". I especially liked
this part:

> [A] thought crossed her mind. “Richard is pretty smart, and if I tell him
> about an interesting problem, he’ll find the answer before I do and take all
> the fun out of it for me.” So Joan decided to strike a deal with him. “I
> said, Look, I don’t want us to compete, so let’s divide up physics between
> us. I’ll take auroras and you take the rest of the Universe. And he said
> OK!”

[1] [https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-
of...](https://findingada.com/shop/a-passion-for-science-stories-of-discovery-
and-invention/joan-feynman-from-auroras-to-anthropology/)

~~~
ascar
Amazing read. Thank you! Inspiring how her brother encouraged her into
sciences after she got completely crushed by her mother.

From the same extract:

\begin{quote}

“Women can’t do science, because their brains aren’t made for it,” Lucille
Feynman declared to her eight-year-old daughter Joan. The news was a huge blow
to the little girl’s ambitions which, at the time in 1935, were firmly set on
following her brother Richard into a life scientific. “I remember sitting in a
chair and weeping,” she recalls.

[...]

The path of Joan’s life would be changed significantly one night when Richard
woke her up and told her to get dressed and follow him out into the street. He
took her away from the house and the street lights and out onto a wide open
golf course nearby with a big dark sky above them. “I can still remember in my
mind’s eye the green lights dancing in the sky”, Joan recalls of the
flickering northern lights Richard had lead her outside to witness. “He told
me that it was an aurora and no one knew what caused it exactly.”

In that moment, she was hooked. And whilst the doubts about a woman’s
abilities to undertake a career in science, planted in her by Lucille,
remained, Joan’s interest in science continued to be fuelled by Richard’s
progress through university. Before he’d left home, her brother had made a
deal with her that whilst away at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), studying for his bachelor’s degree, he would answer any science
question that she sent him.

“For quite a while we had a notebook which went back and forth, and he sent me
a problem in maths and I sent the answer,” remembers Joan of that time. Then
for her fourteenth birthday, he gave her the book ‘Astronomy’ by Robert Horace
Baker. “It was a book people studied at college,” she remembers. “And he’d
pasted my name in it. I was so excited.”

Somewhat daunted by the advanced level of the book, Joan wrote to Richard to
ask how she should read it. He replied that she should start at the beginning
and read until she didn’t understand, and then start at the beginning again.
And each time she’d get a little further.

“So I did,” says Joan, “and I got a little further each time. And then one day
there was a figure in the book of a spectrum and underneath it said ‘the
relative strengths of the Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms… of Stellar
Atmospheres from the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’.” The caption was a
revelation to Joan. Cecilia was a woman’s name, and the hyphenated family name
indicated she was married. It was proof that a married woman was capable of
doing science.

\end{quote}

I also find this little excerpt about how she encouraged scientific thinking
in her children inspiring:

> [...] Joan was determined to instil a sense of curiosity and wonder in her
> own children.

> Her son Charles remembers one occasion when, at the age of about six, he
> asked her about her job as a scientist. In response Joan handed him a spoon.
> “Drop it on the table,” she said. Charles let it fall. “Why did it fall? Why
> didn’t it float up to the ceiling?” asked Joan. It had never occurred to
> Charles that there was a whyinvolved. “Because of gravity,” she continued.
> “A spoon will always fall, a hot-air balloon will always rise.” Charles
> dropped the spoon again and again until she made him stop. The boy had no
> idea what gravity was, but the idea of “why?” kept rattling around in his
> head.

~~~
darkwater
About this

> I also find this little excerpt about how she encouraged scientific thinking
> in her children inspiring:

I have an almost 5yo daughter that since she was barely 2 started asked "why?"
about almost anything. I promised myself that I would never leave a question
unanswered, to not hinder/limit her natural curiosity. Let's see how this will
turn out!

~~~
rcollyer
My eldest in some ways skipped the "why" stage. "How" was a much more
important question to him. Although, he did ask his mother once why the sun
was on fire, but she passed him off to me on. Because his questions were often
complex, and outside of my expertise, I would often say, "I don't know",
usually followed by, "we can look it up, though".

~~~
sukilot
One of the key lessons of physical science is that "why" is the same as "how".
"Why" is a psychological layer, how we thinking about "how". There is no "why"
in physics.

~~~
tobrien6
That's quite true in physical science. However, physical science is a fairly
new endeavor. The "why" may not be entirely psychological, but mathematical,
at the end of the day.

------
comment_ran
Richard and Joan had a good father. Clearly, both of them were influenced by
the father.

```

Feynman:

But my father, you see, interested me in patterns at the very beginning, and
then later in things, like we would turn over stones and watch the ants carry
the little white babies down deeper into the holes. We would look at worms.
All the time playing — when we’d go for walks, we’d look at things all the
time, and then he’d tell me about things of every kind. The stars, the bugs,
geometry things, and so on. He was always telling me interesting things — the
way birds fly, the way ocean waves work, or something, you see, the weather. I
don’t know why, any more, but there was always talking about the world, from
every angle. Not just mathematics or anything like that, but the whole
business he was interested in, and he was always telling me things. So he
therefore developed somehow, inside me, more or less naturally, an interest in
anything rational and scientific.

...

Weiner:

That’s very interesting. Evidently your father’s influence spread.

Feynman:

She said that it was because she would overhear us talking, and then she would
ask me things, and I would explain it to her. That’s what she says. It wasn’t
so direct in her case.

```

~~~
kelnos
It _is_ telling, though, that Richard was directly influenced by his father,
but Joan had to get that influence secondhand.

~~~
thesz
What does it tell?

Joan and Richard were born 9 years apart. Richard was more interesting to his
father because he was older. Being eighteen, one clearly can understand more
than at nine years old.

------
aneutron
Upon reading "Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman !" and "What do you care
what other people think ?", I have become somewhat of a fan of Mr. Richard
Feynman. (Despite it being against his idea about idolizing people).

But throughout the two books, his relationship with his sister, Joan Feynman,
was an extremely intriguing once. They were both brilliant, and they both
encouraged each other.

I got the impression that he, being the person to refuse authority and
conforming with the pre-established, always came back to his sister for an
opinion on how to handle "mere humans". And it showed in the second part of
his story about the Challenger investigation.

May she rest in piece.

~~~
aborsy
I wouldn’t take those stories seriously. He spent a lot of time generating
stories and anecdotes about himself.

Today a PhD student would come up with something like path integrals and would
barely be granted a PhD.

Real science and showmanship are different things.

~~~
mhh__
A PhD wouldn't be granted for reformulating quantum mechanics?

Keep in mind, the Schrödinger equation was published less than 20 years prior
to Feynman's PhD.

~~~
aborsy
It was considered “reformulation” back then. By today’s standards, it’s a
conference paper and publishable if you combine it with politics.

The diagrams would certainly be criticized today that they are graphical
illustration of known expressions, not new and certainly not rigorous.

Also, path integrals were taken right out of Dirac’s so called little paper
and Norbert wiener’s papers. Dirac thought they are straightforward but not
rigorous and was busy with other stuff anyways. Again today if you propose
something like that, it would be rejected on the ground that it’s not
rigorous.

~~~
mhh__
Feynman diagrams were criticised at the time. Dyson showed they were
equivalent to Schwinger's methods, then people gradually realized they were
physical as well as helpful.

------
0xfaded
Its warming to see the impact that early positive mentorship can have over the
span of a lifetime.

I don't mean to say that without her brother she wouldn't have achieved great
things. However, I think it's extraordinarily likely that he helped her find a
passion that lead her all the way to the forefront of her field.

------
DrBazza
"For her fourteenth birthday, Richard gave Feynman a copy of Astronomy by
Robert Horace Baker, a college-level physics text, that both taught her about
physics and what was possible: Feynman credited a figure attributed to Cecilia
Payne-Gaposchkin for proving to her that women could indeed have a career
doing science."

Fun fact: the new HS2 tunnel boring machine in the UK is named after Cecilia.

------
MattGrommes
> Feynman was married with two children and, having not secured the kind of
> research position she was looking for, she decided to take a break from
> physics to take on the role of homemaker.

> The break was short-lived, as Feynman grew depressed from the drudgery of
> keeping a home and caring for two small children: In 1962, at the advice of
> a therapist, she went in search of employment

Imagine how many great minds the world lost to societal rules about women
staying home and not having careers. The number of mediocre men who went out
into the world when they could have stayed at home while their wife worked is
mind boggling and terrible to think about.

~~~
globular-toast
Eh? If you actually read what you quoted you'd see that she tried to secure a
position but failed and resigned to be a homemaker. There is no indication
that it was anything to do with "societal rules". If men don't succeed in
getting the position they want they too take on a less favourable role because
they have to.

You're really grasping at straws looking for things to be outraged by here.

~~~
MattGrommes
Although I made the comment based on the quote about a particular woman, I was
thinking more generally in my comment. The kind of feeling she had about
staying home is echoed many times over by other women I'm sure.

Thank you for concern at my level of outrage but I'll be fine.

~~~
globular-toast
This pandering to women will not help you get laid. Just let people do what
they want. 99% of women don't want to do difficult jobs. The ones that do
already have those jobs because guys like you giving them preferential
treatment are everywhere.

------
fs111
I read "Surely your joking Mr. Feynman" a few years ago, but to this day I
somehow never knew he had a sister that was an accomplished scientist.

~~~
Cilvic
I'm reading it at the moment too, loving it! Maybe halfway through _he hasn 't
mentioned her once I believe._

Edit: See below how she is mentioned.

~~~
pjc50
While Richard Feynman's anecdotes are great entertainment, after a while you
realise that the common theme is how great Richard Feynman is.

~~~
mac01021
Well isn't the book just a compilation by RF's friend, constructed from
interview sessions?

I'm sure RF had a healthy ego, but I don't think he can be blamed entirely for
this feature of the book.

------
Quai
Awesome woman, and a fascinating family!

I'm no expert, so excuse my ignorance: Wasn't the "origin" of auroras know
long before her time? I recall reading about Kristian Birkeland's terrella
experiment where he demonstrated how the earths magnetic field would "focus"
particles from the sun around the poles.

Of course, this does not change the fact that she was a great scientist, and
did important discoveries about aroras and astronomy in general.

------
codezero
That’s a bummer. I used to work in solar physics so met her a few times and
coauthored a conference proceeding with her. She was an exceptional scientist.

------
tuyguntn
Is there any reading related to how their parents raise them with such a
passion to science? (I believe geniuses can be raised)

~~~
dennis_jeeves
>I believe geniuses can be raised

I believe the opposite. Nature vs nurture thing...

Not saying that encouragement, environment etc. does not play a role, it does.

~~~
efdee
Not everyone has the same potential, but a lot of potential goes to waste
because it is not encouraged.

------
lkesteloot
Oh no! I _just_ finished reading James Gleick's _Genius_ this weekend, and I'm
halfway through _No Ordinary Genius_ (both about Richard Feynman). The latter
has many long quotes from Joan, and I was wondering just yesterday if she was
still alive. She sounded pretty great. (And I highly recommend both books.)

------
mohit888
Really a great read. Its a huge loss!!!

------
tehjoker
Pour one out for a real one. Rest in peace Joan Feynman.

------
rcarmo
Why is there no black bar on the site? (she may not have been in CS or tech as
we know it, but...)

~~~
rcarmo
What is the point of downvoting this sort of thing? Is there no openness to
discussing it?

~~~
progman32
Part of the issue may be that the community doesn't know what the current
rules are for activating the black bar. So it's difficult to discuss
productively. I'd be surprised if there's any bad faith here. Anyone know how
it works?

~~~
rcarmo
Well, I give up. Seriously. Got downvoted twice for no real reason (as far as
I can tell). This is why I’m always ambivalent/afraid to post direct
questions/opinion on HN.

------
ponker
Incredible to see the resemblance with her brother Richard.

