 Scary Boots! She's going to talk about Richard Feynman! Hello! So, for those who witnessed me flailing out split screens, I'd like to reassure you that I do have seven years of formal higher education, and I still can't handle that, so that's how good I am. So, this talk is, as you may get the impression, about Richard Feynman, dick by name, dick by nature. And why am I doing this talk? So, who here has heard of Richard Feynman? Lot of hands going up, and anybody whose hand isn't going up, I thank you for your trust. Who here has heard of Werner Heisenberg? Oh, that was the same amount of hands, dammit. You're ruining my point, folks. Okay, okay, who is heard of Paul Dirac? Thank you, everybody. Anyway, the point that I was trying to make and was not the right point to make in this crowd is that Feynman is surprisingly well known compared to other theoretical physicists. And I'd like to talk about why that is and what that means. So, short answer, he was bloody clever, pretty egotistical, and he put an awful lot of work into shaping his public image with stories about what a clever and fun person he was. On the downside, a lot of those stories have someone else as the but, or maybe don't support other people to go on and also be successful physicists. So, I'd kind of like to send that up, and for people that, like, two people in the room who don't know who he is, I'd like to give a brief review of the good things he did, and for everyone else, I'd like to maybe introduce you to some other aspects that you might want to consider. So, if you know more physics than me, stay for the jokes. If you know more jokes than me, stay for the righteous wrath. If you have more righteous wrath than me, then why not cool down with a nice cool glass of physics? So, those are your options. If anybody wants to call me out on any details of this, here are my references. They will pop up again later. So, if you want to read more about it, this is all online at us more bitly. This is Richard Feynman, and I appear to have written my notes twice here. So, he was a Nobel physicist in the 20th century, but there are quite a lot of those. I mean, we make at least one a year. Why do people talk about him in particular? Well, a lot of his reputation comes from the fun stories he told about his life involving such things as playing bongos and breaking security and picking locks and picking up women, all of which are not often associated with physicists. And you will also notice, if you're paying attention, that one of those is not like the others. So, pat yourself on the back, because a surprising amount of biographers don't seem to have noticed that manipulating objects is a hobby, whereas manipulating people is a character flaw. And this is the sort of thing that gets you described as... Oh, sorry, there we go. This is the sort of thing that gets you described as a character, which I think is code for someone you'd rather read about than hang about with. As you'll know, if you ever shared a house with someone who played bongos, I have. It was not good. That is the most excellent laugh. Thank you. So, Feynman's biggest achievement, there's quite a few of them. He did a lot of really significant physics that a lot of other people built on, which is one of the reasons for his reputation and why even physicists respect him, because they do tend to be quite a bitchy crowd, and they like attention and they get a bit sad when other people take away the attention that's meant for them. So, I've only got time to go through one achievement. He also worked in superconductivity and various other things, but I'm going to talk about quantum electrodynamics. So, as the name might suggest, it was a problem when you tried to combine the laws of quantum mechanics, so kind of how things behave when you get down to really small particles, the most fundamental, with the behavior of electromagnetic fields, thematic. So, that kind of is when you're trying to incorporate special relativity and how things get different depending on how you're moving. So, when you try and combine those things, that was a problem kind of in the 1930s, 40s, and up to when this work was published. And these diagrams are what we call Feynman diagrams. You will not be surprised to know where the name comes from. So, the general contribution that Feynman made here was to make it clear and easy for other physicists to do this work. So, he spent a lot of time thinking things through, making it easy to work with, rather than being idiosyncratic, he went for them kind of practically as tools. And a really key point for him was to take this based on what he was good at rather than just accepting what, take this based on ways that made sense to him, rather than just accepting how other people did things. So, this is, have I got a laser? Right. Got a laser. So, this one shows a diagram where you have a photon, wiggly line that goes up here, and an electron, straight line that goes up here. And it's fine, but if you calculate how likely it is to do that, the numbers come out a bit wrong. But there's another possibility, right? Because if you're only looking at where they start and where they finish, they could be doing whatever in the middle. So, it could be that the electron comes up here, it absorbs a photon, a bit of light, so it gets a bit of extra energy, then it moves on a bit, then it re-emits the photon, and then what you see at the end looks the same. Or it could be that it goes up here, emits a photon, then observes a photon. And what you see at the end would be the same. And you find that as you add these more complicated diagrams, you get closer and closer to what we see in reality. So, this was kind of, these diagrams are a way of laying out the possibilities that you need to take into account to make your numbers work out right. And there's an infinite number of these diagrams because you can keep adding in complicated stuff. So, you know, you can have this kind of madness here where you've got an electron that's going up, it emits a photon, then it emits another photon, then those photons come together, annihilate, create two electrons, one which is an antiparticle and one which is a real particle, well, one which is a regular particle, then they self-annihilate and create another one. There's all this stuff going on. And Feynman's insight was to make a set of tools so that it was easy to categorize what reactions you needed to look at, how to make an easily used set of maths tools. So, you have a certain maths equation that corresponds to this line, certain equation corresponding to this vertex, and you put all those together and that tells you how to make little corrections to the baseline theory until it comes up with the numbers that are closer and closer to reality. And as these diagrams get more complicated, thankfully, they get less and less significant. So, they make less and less of a difference to the outcome. So, that's kind of nice, because you can say, well, I want the answer to this precision, so I'll stop calculating as soon as the diagrams get this complicated. And this is really interesting because apart from anything else, here, whoop, you've got two parts, like at the edge with the loop, you've got two particles that are just coming out of the vacuum. You've got two particles where there weren't two particles before there was just light, and then they annihilate and then there's no particles, there's just light. That's kind of mad that we've got particles just appearing. It's kind of mad that one of them is travelling backwards in time because apparently the maths of a negative charge travelling backwards in time is the same as the maths of a positive charge travelling forwards in time. So, we've got that point where particles and antiparticles can be equated to each other if you just switch the direction of time, which is something physicists are happy to do, just like casually. So, basically, I want you to take from this that he built a set of tools that were really useful for us to figure out what was going on under the conditions of relativity and quantum physics, which was difficult. And he attributed his ability to do this when he was doing his naval prize speech when he talked about this, to his desire not to conform to work out things for himself. And that's admirable. I mean, less admirable is the other conclusion that he reached from here. He decided he shouldn't wash his hands after urinating because that was just superstition. It was just what everybody else did, and why would he be like other people? He also didn't believe in brushing his teeth because he thought it was just big dentistry. I mean, I paraphrase, but that's what he meant, which makes the rest of this really weird in that he was constantly trying to pick up women, constantly harassing women and trying to, you know, hit on his colleagues' wives, go and stay with his colleagues and pass to their families, hit on his students' wives. And apparently he did this while never washing his hands or brushing his teeth, which I think is quite astounding. He used to go to bars, buy women drinks, and then get mad that while they let him buy them drinks, they didn't sleep with him. And I can't quote this whole story here because it's not very succinctly described, but he called a woman worse than a whore for refusing to sleep with him after he'd bought her a sandwich. Which is kind of the opposite of whoredom and sort of gives you a bit of a brain melt if you think about it too much. So there's two interesting things here. One, that Professor Feynman thinks that every woman is a sex worker and is prepared to stand up, argue with them about whether they are or not. And the other one is that he thinks the going rate for sex is a can of coconut subway, which is strange. I mean, imagine he approached other professions the same way, oh, hey mate, let me buy that tuna roll for you, it'll be okay. Well, why are you buying me things? Oh, I'm an incredibly rich professor and I find you attractive. Well, that's uncharacteristically altruistic, but whatever. And now, now I've bought you that sandwich, you're gonna come home and unblock my toilet. What, what? I don't know. Well, you know the rules when you accept to the sandwich, you've agreed to be that person's plumber for a night. Come home and unblock my tubes right now. What? What? Yeah, I think we can all agree that Feynman had a bit of a weird attitude towards exchanging money for goods and services. So, there, yeah, I've lost my cursor. So, people often say he was of his time, as if that was an explanation of his behavior, but everyone's of their time, right? Genghis Khan was of his time, Sylvia Rivera was of her time, Gandhi was of his time, Richard Nixon was of his time. It's kind of what being mortal is all about, existing for a finite amount of time. So, it's what you do in your time that matters. And I think we should be clear that this isn't Feynman's dirty laundry, this is something he decided to boast about and write in a book to show how clever and important he was. And this was published in the 80s. Now, I do acknowledge that social norms change and I'm a researcher. I'm not the best researcher in the world, but I'm pretty diligent. So, I called my mom and I asked her, in the 80s, was it socially acceptable to assume that if you bought a woman a drink, she would sleep with you? And she confirms no. So, according to my mother, this is officially not the acceptable detail, not the acceptable thing to do. And when you tell this as a fun Feynman story, or you refer to the books that he wrote this story in as fun and suitable books for people who want to go into physics to read, what are you suggesting? When you suggest that if getting women to sleep with you is just an achievement and a problem to solve, if it's just like picking locks, as if women are mechanical and you just need to buy them the right things, say the right things, put the right things in the right hole and wiggle them around, and then you'll be entitled to their bodies. What message do you give to the women around you? And what does it say about how you think about women and how you think successful people, successful physicists think about women? That's a homework question for everybody. You can send me your answers on Twitter. So, I'm gonna race through this bit. It's gonna get lighter. I'm gonna show you that was the heaviest bit. We threw it heaviest in terms of maths and in terms of righteous wrath. So here's an excerpt from a speech that Feynman gave to a teacher's conference in 1966. I listened to a conversation between two girls and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up. That is, if you go over each time, the same amount that you go up, you make a straight line and that's a deep principle of geometry. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding geometry. I did learn a lesson. The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry if we can only communicate with it the right way. Normally when people are invited to give conference keynotes, they try and give an inspiring talk. So, I'd kind of like to point out that he gave this talk nine years after his sister had got a PhD in physics. One that involved her using vectors and so probably understanding geometry. And secondly, he gave this talk after he'd worked with Qian Sheng Wu. Incidentally, Feynman's legacy. So, he's reported as being able to do all sorts of things but I'm kind of querying how well he could actually do those things because he's reported as being able to write Chinese and when I looked into it, he could write four Chinese characters, which I would say is not being able to write the entirety of Chinese. So, he did some work with this lady and she did a really, really complicated experiment where she figured out if the universe is the same if you reflect it in a mirror. So, if you spin the nuclei of atoms, do they give out more particles in one direction than the other and thus would the universe be the same if we flipped its direction? And apparently Feynman thought that this woman was doing her amazing work through working it all out with knitting. So, apparently when she was talking to the male theorists they were like, knit, knit, knit, knit, we'd like you to do this and she was like, and then they handed it back. And then after a day of going back and forth, the entire room was covered in more scraps of wool than the underground sheep fighting ring. Apparently, he thought that the whole discussion between this woman and her theoretical colleagues looked like the soft play area at CERN. Really? Oh, there we go. Really all women require yarn-based explanations of lines and shapes? I mean, does it have to be knitting? Can they do it with crochet? Can we do it with fabric? Can we do it with felt? If felt works, maybe we could try using paper or maybe we could put some kind of dye pattern on the paper that represents the concepts in some sort of symbolic representation. Or maybe women just basically have the same sort of minds as blokes and also understand geometry, I don't know. Occam's razor, right? So what was he thinking when he stood up and stood in front of a generation of teachers who were gonna be trying to teach classes, some of which included some women to do geometry and said that it was utterly impossible. Just incidentally, this woman did that experiment. She found out that the universe would not be the same if we reflected it in a mirror. Her male colleagues, the theorists, got the Neville Prize, she got nothing. Excellent scientist. Feynman is also credited as an artist. I leave you to make your own artistic judgments on this picture of his that I've reproduced. He worked on learning to draw with a friend because he knew he could use it to get women naked. And my own credit to our astimable colleague, Hannah Fry, for pointing out this quote, which is in his book of memoirs, the one that was published in the 80s, the one I checked with my mom. I did a drawing of a beautiful blonde from the art class and I tried to draw the shadows as they were. I drew her torso as well so you can also see her breasts and the shadows they made. I stuck it in with the other drawings in the exhibit and called it Madam Curie, observing the radiations from radium. The message I intended to convey was that nobody thinks of Mary Curie as a woman as feminine with beautiful hair, bare breasts and all that. They only think of the radium part. Now, Marie Skwardowska Curie, who liked to be named by her Polish family name as well as her French married name. I know it's hard to pronounce for those of us that don't have Polish heritage, so I've asked a Polish friend and I've produced a guide to this pronunciation, picture Mary Curie waiting for you to introduce her. Then she's joined with her crew and they do, and then the trumpets come out and they do a little bouncy dance like this together. It's Marie Skwardowska Curie. There we go, you won't forget it because I made a tip of myself on stage. So it may sound like Feynman himself was obsessed with breasts and he actually wanted to think of breasts whenever he thought of female scientists, but actually it's a well-established historical fact that Marie Skwardowska Curie did most of her work as a way of seeking validation for her bosom. As these excerpts from her diary show, dear diary, today I picked up the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the wonder bra, no one noticed. Yes, I am the only person so far to receive prizes and two scientists, but when will somebody talk about my incredible, rounded, shiny natural medals, by which of course I mean my breasts? My husband Pierre expressed his respect for me by insisting I be given credit for our joint work, but I really wanted lingerie. When will people realize that all the work I do into the transmutation of nuclei and the discovery of new elements is actually a cry for attention, specifically attention towards my assets? What do I have to do to get people to notice my stupendous bosumbas? I tried installing portable miniature X-ray stations on the battlefield of World War I. I thought, soldiers, they'll appreciate the female form, but no, they just appreciated their war wounds being diagnosed. Somebody noticed my amazing cleavage. I guess I'll go away and invent radiotherapy. That seems like the sort of thing that will draw attention to my tits. P.S., it was a bloody good idea to store my diary next to my samples, the self-eliminating pages that were shaving me a ton in candles. So I should say, trying to be fair here, I read a number of books as research for this and they do say that the few female colleagues Feynman had, females structurally discouraged from participating in physics at this stage was definitely a factor. Other factors can be discussed. He says that the female college Feynman had felt accepted by him on an individual level and his sister does state that he was supportive. I do wonder how many people would have come forward to say they had a problem with the greatest genius of the age. I also think it's interesting, of this 468 page book, only two pages addressed how his values and actions could be seen as sexist. So I think there's definitely more to be said on that point. I should say he was a great scientist and I really enjoy watching his lectures, you know? I'm not that full of feminist hate. I still like physics. But, and he did do some good fun stuff. I mean, I like lockpicking, I like breaking security. But if one's gonna go beyond the pure science and talk about the person, you need to accept that his stories about women are troubling and that repeating them uncritically perpetuates the ideas that he was working with. Even if you just tell stories that don't mention that, you're still implying that the behavior that went along with it was okay. Think about how it would feel to be a woman in this situation and think about how you deal with somebody who was stunned that you could understand geometry, who'd be thinking about your breasts and who'd expect you to reciprocate his advances. If you're gonna talk about what he was like as a person, you have to include contributions from all his stories, even the complicated ones, and admit he really was a dick. Citations, I'm not taking questions because I need to go and have a drink. Thank you. The inimitable, scary. Thank you so much, scary for that fantastic presentation.