

Gell-Mann on Feynman (video) - vinutheraj
http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/gell-mann.html

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rfreytag
I like Gell-Mann's story about how Feynman would intentionally 'forget' his
coat and tie when going to dine in the campus formal dining room and instead
wear their scabby leftover tie and coat.

How might have things turned out differently if Gell-Mann had been the sort to
realize that a good practical joke would have been to replace the scabby
attire with Feynman's own tie and coat provided by some fleet-footed student.
When Feynman arrived he would instead of being the iconoclast as usual he
would have had to settle for just conforming as his own tie and coat would be
sitting there waiting for him.

Feynman might have appreciated that.

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RK
I once took a class with Gell-Mann with only a handful of other students. He
did a lot of impressions of people's accents, so I asked him if he would
imitate Feynman's, but he claimed he couldn't do it.

The funny thing about him complaining about Feynman's anecdotes is that Gell-
Mann seemed to have just as many about himself.

A very interesting guy to talk to, as you might expect, though at times a
little overwhelming.

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projectileboy
Thanks for the tale; I recall reading from other sources (perhaps in the book
"Genius"...?) that both Feynman and Gell-Mann had enormous egos that would
butt against each other from time to time. It doesn't strike me that there's
really a "bad guy" in this story.

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stcredzero
I think Gell-Mann's problem is not Feynman's generation of anecdotes about
himself, but Feynman's generation of anecdotes about Gell-Mann.

The bit about brushing teeth. I once knew a very intelligent young man who
once concluded that sleeping was a superstition. He tried to not sleep. But he
was in grade school at the time, and he hadn't heard about the Uberman
polyphasic sleep schedule.

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jamesbritt
I wonder if Feynman knew what annoyed Gel-Mann and would do things just to
fuck with him. It seems like the sort of practical joke Feynman might enjoy.

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stcredzero
And Gell-Mann seems like the perfect "straight-man" for him.

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10ren
Feynman comes across as egotistical to me - it's a big part of his impish
charm. Wouldn't we all like to be able to get away with that?

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xenophanes
I believe that Feynman created anecdotes primarily because he was bored (not
because of an ego), and he didn't spend tremendous effort on them (as Gell-
Mann says) but rather he spent some effort on them and still had energy left
over: he needed _more_ to do, not less.

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vinutheraj
But wouldn't Gell-Mann, a guy who worked with him be a better judge of that,
maybe Feynman did spend a good amount of energy of generating anecdotes, noone
is perfect. It's becuase of all these anecdotes that we like him, not because
we understand his papers of quantum electrodynamics. So maybe Gell-Mann has a
point there !

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xenophanes
I have read many opinions of Feynman by people who knew him personally.
Sometimes they contradict, so we can't just assume they are all true. In any
case, people can be mistaken and we should think for ourselves. There is a lot
of evidence about Feynman publicly available. Based on that evidence,
including Gell-Mann's testimony, I think what I said.

I do not say this in an attempt to make Feynman perfect (in fact inability to
find enough to do is a flaw).

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TriinT
More on Feynman Vs. Gell-Mann: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578345>

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dutchkabuki
classic quote from the article above:

For all his accomplishments, Gell-Mann couldn't be happy until he had written
a best seller like Feynman's. Adding to his melancholy, "Surely, You're
Joking" was followed in 1988 by Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time,
which sold more than nine million copies. To Gell-Mann's colleagues, a book of
light-hearted anecdotes told by their intense and pedantic friend seemed a
dubious prospect. It would have to be called, one of them said, "Dammit,
Murray, You're Right Again!" Others remarked that Gell-Mann, unlike Hawking,
didn't have the advantage of being confined to a wheelchair.

