Subject
Feyman & VN: Kindred spirits? (fwd)
Date
Body
I just came across the following passages in James Gleick's GENIUS: THE
LIFE AND SCIENCE OF RICHARD FEYNMAN (page 131):
It was said of Feynman that he had extraordinary physical intuition, but
that alone did not account for his analytic power. ... The calculus, the
symbols, the operators had for him almost as tangible a reality as the
physical quantities on which they worked. Just as some people see
numerals in color in their mind's eye, Feynman associated colors with
the abstract variables of the formulas he understood so intimately. "As
I'm talking," he once said, "I see vague pictures of Bessel functions
from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light tan Js, slightly violet-bluish
Ns, and dark brown Xs flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must
look like to the students."
Feyman on psychiatry (223): "Witch doctor. Baloney. Faker. Feyman held an
extreme view of psychiatry. His mind was his bailiwick and he preferred
to think himself in control. [...] He preferred to stress the
unscientific hocus-pocus of that enterprise (conveniently shifting
terminology, lack of reproducible experiments..."
LIFE AND SCIENCE OF RICHARD FEYNMAN (page 131):
It was said of Feynman that he had extraordinary physical intuition, but
that alone did not account for his analytic power. ... The calculus, the
symbols, the operators had for him almost as tangible a reality as the
physical quantities on which they worked. Just as some people see
numerals in color in their mind's eye, Feynman associated colors with
the abstract variables of the formulas he understood so intimately. "As
I'm talking," he once said, "I see vague pictures of Bessel functions
from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light tan Js, slightly violet-bluish
Ns, and dark brown Xs flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must
look like to the students."
Feyman on psychiatry (223): "Witch doctor. Baloney. Faker. Feyman held an
extreme view of psychiatry. His mind was his bailiwick and he preferred
to think himself in control. [...] He preferred to stress the
unscientific hocus-pocus of that enterprise (conveniently shifting
terminology, lack of reproducible experiments..."