Life and Physics

If you click on the “Richard Feynman” tag of this blog you will find he features quite often. He was a great physicist who had an enormous impact on the field in general and on particle physics in particular (no pun intended but it was hard to avoid). His lectures both inspired and helped me through my degree and I still recommend them to students.

I also, in my late teens, enjoyed reading his collection of anecdotes, “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”. I probably took from it “proof that nerdy men can be funny, popular, and (reputedly) successful with women”, a reassurance I reckon I needed at the time. I think, though memory can be treacherous, that I was taken aback by the now quite notoriously misogynistic chapter on his interactions with bar girls, but assimilated this as him simply playing a role at a particular time in his life.

The reason for this post is this article by Aida Behmard, published yesterday in CalTech Letters.

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