

The Feynman File (2005) - kitcar
http://discovermagazine.com/2005/mar/feynman-file#.UYajjbWPMnk

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balsam
Most biographies of Feynman are really hagiographies of Feynman, who was no
doubt a great showman. Here's a collection of his letters, which, despite
revealing some personal flaws, show that he is wiser and more vulnerable than
we imagine. Really underrated in my opinion.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465023711/>

(The letters to family and Wolfram is also there.)

Another good one, in my opinion, is a rather raw portrait made from the
vantage point of a student towards the end of Feynman's life. It's the
unvarnished details that reveal the ordinariness and greatness of that
physicist dude.

[http://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Rainbow-Search-Physics-
Vintag...](http://www.amazon.com/Feynmans-Rainbow-Search-Physics-
Vintage/dp/0307946495/)

I think Feynman really believed that anybody could become as (wise?
accomplished? happy?) as he, and I think most books don't do justice to that
dream of his, by making him out to be some kind of trickster god.

------
btilly
A random note.

I first really understood special relativity from reading Feynman's lectures.
A concept that he explained in there is that E = MC^2 really means that energy
and mass are the same thing. A moving object weighs more because in addition
to its own weight, it has the weight of its kinetic energy.

This is a very nice way to think about the issue. Unfortunately I discovered
years later that nobody else thinks of it this way. Instead they think about
mass as being rest mass, and that you turn from having energy to having mass
and vice versa. Linguistically slightly different, but logically equivalent.

It still makes me sad that physics doesn't think about things in the simpler
way that Feynman presented.

~~~
shardling
I can pretty much guarantee you Feynman didn't either -- when he was actually
working with relativistic equations. The idea of a rest mass makes everything
way, _way_ simpler.

There was a Feynman quote in one of my physics texts that left a big
impression on me -- basically saying that you shouldn't call yourself a
physicist until you can understand the same physics using multiple models,
gleaning insight from whichever is the most useful in context.

~~~
kachnuv_ocasek
>you shouldn't call yourself a physicist until you can understand the same
physics using multiple models This applies to pretty much any field. Feynman
was a great physicist from this point of view.

~~~
SquareWheel
You want two line breaks in there.

------
rckrd
Interesting read, but if anyone is interested in more personal anecdotes like
this, I suggest:

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-
Char...](http://www.amazon.com/Surely-Feynman-Adventures-Curious-
Character/dp/0393316041)

[2][http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-
Think/dp/039332...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-
Think/dp/0393320928/ref=pd_sim_b_1)

