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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This "Fun to Imagine" interview was recorded on 16mm film at Feynman's home in Altadena, California, in 1983 and first broadcast on BBC2. He gives many, many examples of wave equations and conservation of energy and different ways that physical systems exhibit damping so that oscillations die out over time.

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 feynmans-mass 80.0)
(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))

And this 1973 interview filmed by Yorkshire TV includes a discussion (22:41) with Fred Hoyle:


The famous American physicist Richard Feynman used to take holidays in England. His third wife, Gweneth Howarth, was a native of West Yorkshire, so every year the Feynman family would visit her hometown of Ripponden or the nearby hamlet of Mill Bank.

In 1973 Yorkshire public television made a short film of the Nobel laureate while he was there. The resulting film, Take the World From Another Point of View, was broadcast in America as part of the PBS Nova series. The documentary features a fascinating interview, but what sets it apart from other films on Feynman is the inclusion of a lively conversation he had with the eminent British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle.

32:00 The French historian Feynman had a conversation with was perhaps André Maurois. The artist Robert Irwin died in October this year.

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