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!”
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.
> 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.
This is a great example of what people mean when they say "representation matters". Humans benefit greatly from existence proofs that people similar themselves are capable of doing X.
Is that true in general or only when people have been lied to by their mothers in a demonstrably erroneous way?
People often say that others, usually children, require physical similarity (sex, skin colour) to be inspired. This I find very sad and highly contradictory to my own schooling.
I mean all people are broadly similar. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin has been inspirational to me too, but we have little in common physically or socially.
Of course if a I'm wrong people should be up in arms about primary schools not having teachers representative of the broader population - success can be predicted at that point with a high degree of certainty, I gather.
> Is that true in general or only when people have been lied to by their mothers in a demonstrably erroneous way?
Mothers are only one potential source of erroneous beliefs about one's inability to achieve something based on some personal characteristic. Surely, we should strive to prevent people from spreading these erroneous beliefs. But existence proofs to the contrary are a very effective, scalable counter-measure. We cannot entirely eradicate ignorance, but we can provide innoculations to prevent others from being harmed by it.
> People often say that others, usually children, require physical similarity (sex, skin colour) to be inspired.
Representation is not always about physical similarity. It is equally important (often more) for intangible characteristics like class, sexual orientation, religion, wealth, etc.
> This I find very sad and highly contradictory to my own schooling.
I find it sad too, but reality is that people are different and our experiences are different. These differences are precisely what makes each individual's contributions to society unique and valuable. But those differences are also a source of perceived limitations.
We are primates and learn by mirroring. If you never see a member of your tribe swim across the river, there's probably a good reason (maybe crocodiles) even if you don't see it (they hide under the surface). So we naturally, wisely avoid behaviors that we don't see people like us engaging in.
This is true even when we define our own tribe based on less tangible attributes.
> Of course if a I'm wrong people should be up in arms about primary schools not having teachers representative of the broader population
That only matters to the degree that kids aspire to be teachers. And, fortunately, the average kid gets enough different teachers and there is enough diversity among them that each kid will likely have a teacher at some point that they identify with.
A single existence proof is sufficient to open the door.
It certainly wasn't true for me. I'm a westerner who spent my childhood in undeveloped parts of southeast asia. If I didn't learn to apply the all-asian-cast stories I heard and read to my own life, I'm sure I would have felt very put out. But, that never happened (and never even crossed my mind as a problem to have) because both my parents always emphasized the universality of the human experience.
We don't know for sure so does it hurt to make the world a little more representational? I would doubt it has any harm, unlike the alternative.
Yes, teachers talk a lot about the lack of diversity too. If you spend a little time with some of them you'll find out. The teachers I know around the world genuinely want the best for their kids.
Payne-Gaposchkin was given an extremely raw deal by Otto Struve at Chicago. I would say she got screwed over more than Henrietta Swan-Leavitt or Rosalind Franklin (but not Jocelyn Bell-Burnell)
> 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!
I'd had the pleasure of answering kids in the 'why' stage before having kids of my own. And resolved to face my own kids with answers whenever I could.
I'm not sure it has been successful, they never really exhausted my ability to answer but I fear it may have sucked out some of the magic - not having answers might be 'better' to some extent if your aim is to foster curiosity and personal goal fulfillment.
My kids are awesome and definitely have some intrigue; but perhaps endeavour to not provide answers!
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".
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.
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.
For my own son at a certain point I stumbled upon the strategy of not providing him with real answers (most probably because I myself didn't know the answers) but instead sharing in his curiosity with him and saying things like "wow that's interesting, I've never thought about that. Maybe this happens because of X, or Y. Do you think it could be because of Z?"
Like Joan quoted above - at some point in their age providing answers takes the fun out of things for them. Or rather closes their curiosity and inclination to further think about the question. I feel now my job is to encourage them to not limit themselves and develop more independence in thinking about things themselves.
Ditto! I also try to never tell the kids "don't ask that question." Though very often I do need to answer with "I don't know, but let's find out if anyone does," then research it later. And occasionally, as recently happened when the question was about the Vietnam war: "that is a very long and complicated story, give me some time to figure out a way to explain a little bit of it."
My kid has just turned two. He hasn't started with "Why" yet, but I am excited for it.
I love the idea of coming up with endless possibilities, labeling realistic ones and why (important) but enjoying the flights of fancy for what they are too!
"Why yes kiddo, I would love to ride a Rainbow-unicornDragon-with-tentacles to work!"....
It is also fun to reply, "Why do you think?" I got this idea from someone who was (momentarily) tired of answering their kids, but I think it's good because a) it helps them reason things from principles b) you sometimes get really neat or at least amusing answers.
I repeated this spoon drop experiment just now and thought about it a bit. I'm astounded by the concept of gravity, and even more so that it "weakens" as we move away from the Earth took we get to zero gravity. I've got thinking about whether I'd get captured by the Sun's gravity - after all the Earth is hurtling around the Sun - until another planet were to come by, or by chance miss getting caught in any planet's gravity and drop out of the Solar system altogether. I also just wondered what causes gravity, whether it is possible to determine and conclude that there must be no gravity at a particular point away from the Earth - all while being seated at my chair.
Sorry, this isn't directly related to the overall discussion but I got so excited by my thoughts that I wanted to share.
There's a relevant quote from the book Anathem about that, but can't find it. Something about sequestering a bunch of monk-scientists with no particle accelerators or other tools, but they still figure out the nature of ultimate reality...
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.
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.
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.
radical idea here: the point of language is for a person to put the ideas from his head into the head of another person. so long as the idea is conveyed, it is successful. piece/peace distinction in spelling only matters when there is a real risk of ambiguity in intended meaning. everyone new what you meant -- so it was OK!
Not radical at all. It goes back at least to the early 1900's. Big newspaper owners like Colonel McCormick wanted to convey meaning by using fewer letters, thus saving on ink and paper costs.
They invented alternate spellings to suit their purposes. Most died out, but a few have stuck with us, like using "thru" for "through."
i am not sure if this is true but george lucas supposedly named episode VI return of the jedi instead of revenge of the jedi to save on ink costs. i am almost completely sure it is not true but i have not yet seen a debunking of this otherwise wacky idea that is plausible, given we are talking about george lucas here.
I always heard the reason for that as “Jedis would never seek revenge”, or something along those lines. Bottom line was that being a Jedi was incompatible with the idea of revenge.
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.
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.
Perhaps, but that's not an indictment of Feynman, but an indictment of how you get a PhD nowadays. Today you get a PhD for something rigorous and technical and ultimately irrelevant compared to Feynman diagrams and path integrals.
In life, you sometimes learn that what is mathematical or cutting edge is not always synonymous with useful or revolutionary.
"Hackers" of 1990s were just script kiddies by today's standards, because the "bar was low". That doesn't make them any less important as far as contributions go.
All in all, maybe you are right, and maybe he is somewhat of a showman. But perhaps that is what we need more. Someone who masters science but also is human.
Do you also want to say that Newton’s Principia is now high school physics? What was pathbreaking at one time is run of the mill now. That’s called scientific advancement...
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.
That's some first class cherry picking you did on the Wikipedia article. Here is the full relevant paragraph:
"Like her brother, Joan was an inquisitive child, and she exhibited an interest in understanding the natural world from an early age. However, her mother and grandmother both dissuaded her from pursuing science, since they believed that women's brains were not physically capable of understanding complex scientific concepts in the way that men's brains could. Despite this, her brother Richard always encouraged her to be curious about the universe. It was he who originally introduced young Joan to auroras when, one night, he coaxed her out of bed to witness the northern lights flickering above an empty golf course near their home. Later, Feynman would find comfort in an astronomy book given to her by her brother. She became convinced that she could, in fact, study science, when she came across a graph based on research by noted astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin."
You are right! I got lost reading the three references after "...in the way that men's brains could.", and did not read the rest of the paragraph. The first reference is amazing, with some cool photos of the two siblings.
No need to apologize. What you said was very clear, and the other commenter has apologized for not fully reading the information, which led to a misguided interpretation of your comment.
The article details that the positive part was her brother Richard Feynman (i love reading / watching him), while her mother is said to have been discouraging.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Joan is mentioned frequently, she is a deep source of comfort, inspiration, and a voice of reason.
> _One time I came home from college for a vacation, and my sister was sort of
unhappy, almost crying: her Girl Scouts were having a fatherdaughter banquet, but our
father was out on the road, selling uniforms. So I said I would take her, being the brother
(I'm nine years older, so it wasn't so crazy)._
> _During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the
paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying.
It's all so complicated." "No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you
didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you
should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line
of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily."
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very
obvious and simple._
> _I called up my sister in New York to thank her for getting me to sit down and
work through that paper by Lee and Yang at the Rochester Conference. After feeling
uncomfortable and behind, now I was in;_
> _Just then my sister calls from New York: "How about the 9 percent what's
happened?"
"I've just discovered that there's new data: 7 percent. . ." "Which way?"
"I'm trying to find out. I'll call you back."
I was so excited that I couldn't think. It's like when you're rushing for an airplane,
and you don't know whether you're late or not, and you just can't make it, when
somebody says, "It's daylight saving time!" Yes, but which way? You can't think in the
excitement._
> _During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated." "No," she' said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily." I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple._
Can't help but think that has some relevance to programming.
I like to tell people that all learning is pain. It’s a sort of contrarianism that I picked up from Buddhism, I guess, where the first noble truth is that everything is pain.
A more careful restatement: we learn abstractions to organize experience, and we learn them only to the extent that they relieve a painful messiness in our experience. So the failure of the Haskell monad tutorial, to take one particular instance, is the failure of “look this was so hard for me that I must make it easy for others.” Let’s give pain relief before the problem sets in. Only problem is, “no pain no gain”: you needed to experience that messiness and confusion before your brain could find a way to understand the underlying principles and organize it. So someone reads your tutorial and has even less of a clear idea because they now pretend to an abstract knowledge which they do not have any concrete experiences to tie it to.
Caveat: this is how my brain works but I cannot be sure about others’.
It's why some people rewrite perfectly good code - because they don't understand the "theory" of the program unless they work through it for themselves.
You can discourage this by writing code that doesn't just perform the required task, but also makes its theory clear to the reader.
That is true for me as well. Read a lot of things from Richard Feynman, even saw some videos / interviews with him. Never saw him mentioning her. Maybe just an oversight.
Same here. I guess in a way by not mentioning her a lot in public he was protecting her from only becoming known as "Richard Feynman's sister". That way you leave the room for the other person to emerge on her own terms.
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.
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.
You are exposed to the right sets of ideas at the right time and your brain through random chance happens to take a particularly fruitful paths to explore the ideas creating an exceptionally useful mental model. You have emotional preconditions that cause you to process this success in a helpful rather than a harmful way. This feeling of success and excitement causes you to spend more time daydreaming about the subject, slowing building a reservoir of powerful and useful mental patterns. Someone can daydream 10-16 hours a day for 14 years, but it is very hard to find someone that can study a subject they don't like for 8 hours a day for 5 years straight. I would argue that studying a subject is less likely to result in new ideas than day dreaming.
Due to having an environment to grow these ideas, not being run over by a car, having the money to pursue schooling, and exploring a field which is undergoing a revolution at the time you could up 'a genius'. Would anyone outside of Academic Physics know Feynman's name, if he entered Physics in 1995 when much of the low hanging fruit had already been harvested?
One could argue that Grothendieck is a counter example to this argument because he grew up in very harsh conditions that for the most part actively suppressed his learning. However I would claim Grothendieck for the luck and timing argument for four reasons:
First the trivial argument, if Grothendieck had starved to death while hiding from the Nazis as a child no one would name him as a genius.
Second, when he started college he was doing very poorly and he almost gave up, but he had mentors and an early success that enabled his later successes. What if he had gotten a cold that stopped him from that early success. It seems likely that given different friendships in college he would have dropped out and never been heard from.
Third, he was very interested in political movements and dedicated much of his life to it. However, he was not particular good at this. If he had an early success in a political tract he wrote, it likely would have led him into an area that he would not have succeeded in as much as Mathematics.
Fourth, French Mathematics at the time was undergoing a revolution because so many of the older Mathematicians had died in WW1 and WW2. This created opportunities for younger Mathematicians to rapidly advance their careers and these younger Mathematicans were critical to Grothendieck not being sidelined.
It's an interesting counterpoint to some of Feynman's stories about himself.
One rather persistent theme was that he had pretty messed up ways of interacting with women, so the discussion here how he mentored his sister are a welcome further layer of nuance on that point.
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.)
You've repeatedly posted flamebait and unsubstantive comments and used multiple accounts to break HN's guidelines. We ban accounts that do those things, so please stop.
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?
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.
> [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...