Richard Feynman: The pleasure of finding things out
I love this video. I watched it when I was growing up and loved it. Now, it’s on YouTube. It’s a wide ranging profile of eloquent genius Richard Feynman. It’s also an example of the kind of intelligent science programming that the BBC used to do. Now it’s all archeology and anti-science. It’s in five parts all added below. (Hat tip: Just think.)
My favourite quote about Feynman:
"The Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm: (1) write down the problem; (2) think very hard; (3) write down the answer." - Murray Gell-mann
(Previous rants on the BBC’s mission to dumb down science programming: BBC dumbs down science and Cultural relativism doesn’t work at 30,000 feet.)
Part one
Part two
Part three
Part four
Part five
Gary McMahon wrote:
Mathew, thanks for this it was brilliant.
I’ve just spent an hour watching the videos that I can’t charge clients for, but feel more rewarded.
As a scientst myself, I have major concerns about the increasing “relevance” of convienient mumbo jumbo dressed up in scientific style language, but knowing that there are still some amoungst us that value real science has made my week.
I’ll need to find out more about this guy (I wish he was my physics lecturer!!).
Cheers from sunny Australia
Posted on 23-Jan-08 at 2:43 am | Permalink
David Bradley wrote:
Feynman is one of my childhood heroes (along with Sir David (Attenborough). Sadly I have a personal anecdote only about the latter.
db
Posted on 23-Jan-08 at 3:08 pm | Permalink
Jacob Skir wrote:
In the 70s I studied physics according to Feynman’s books translated to Russian.
Posted on 23-Jan-08 at 9:21 pm | Permalink
David Bradley wrote:
Somewhere I have a copy “on tape” of Feynman’s seminal lectures on QED…I reviewed them for New Scientist when they were published in the early 1990s…
…I must dig them out and convert to mp3 so I can re-listen on my player while walking the dog.
db
Posted on 24-Jan-08 at 9:28 am | Permalink