Terence Tao and Richard Feynman
The difference between a mathematician and a physicist:
2:51 on choosing what to study. This sounds like quite a general situational logic in science: if you want to make progress you want to study problems on the boundary of the current understanding of the field, This is the only way you are going to make progress. cf Feynman and Hoyle talking about different approaches to science below (22:41). Hoyle was quite happy to be out beyond the frontier.
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At 25:30 he talks about electrostatic forces and our sensation of touch, and at some point he says "If I was made entirely out of electrons, ..." So, if Richard Feynman weighed 80 kg and the interviewer weighed 85 kg, say, and they were both made entirely out of electrons and sitting 2 m apart, then the repulsive force between them would be equivalent to a mass of about 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg (4.7268420808658026e35 Newtons).which is a mass equivelnt to the force under gravity at the earth's surface of 24,256 suns. It's a good thing we have protons!!
At 1:01:29 "Suppose that little things behave very differently than anything that was big, ..." See Bose–Einstein condensate: Superfluid helium-4 for some idea of the current understanding of this phenomenon.
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(define interviewers-mass 85.0)
(define electrons-mass 9.109e-31)
(define electrons-charge 1.602176634e-19)
(define vacuum-permittivity 8.8541878128e-12)
(define pi 3.14158265359)
(define (person-charge mass) (* (/ mass electrons-mass) electrons-charge))
(define (electronic-repulsion m1 m2 r) (/ (* (person-charge m1) (person-charge m2))
(* 4.0 pi vacuum-permittivity r r)))
(define solar-mass 1.98847e30)
(define repulsion (electronic-repulsion feynmans-mass interviewers-mass 2))
(define solar-mass-equiv-repulsion (/ (/ repulsion 9.8) solar-mass))
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