Post by @bstacey@icosahedron.website

2026-08-26 17:30 UTC

@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol @davidculley@hachyderm.io He shared the Nobel Prize with two other physicists who made very closely related contributions to the same topic all at nearly the same time (Schwinger and Tomonaga), and arguably there should have been a fourth (Dyson) if the Prize rules didn't forbid it. Did he figure out important stuff? Sure. Would other people have figured out the same stuff if he hadn't been there to do it? Yeah, probably, given how science works. The calculation technique now known as "Feynman diagrams" made his contribution stand out from Schwinger's and Tomonaga's, but looking at how calculations were done in statistical physics already, it's hard to imagine that those diagrams wouldn't have been invented soon enough even if Feynman hadn't been there to do it. Whether he was a good teacher is a matter of taste. Among physicists (as opposed to podcasters), his books have the rep of being good for revisiting a subject but not for learning it the first time.

Replies (2)

@bstacey@icosahedron.website 2026-08-26 17:40

@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol @davidculley@hachyderm.io What puzzles me is why wearing a suit would make someone feel like Feynman. He wasn't a suit-wearing kind of guy. He had a running joke of refusing to wear a suit jacket to meet the Caltech faculty club's dress code and insisting on being given the most garish spare they had in the closet. He had a whole story about how he got used to dressing up for all the Nobel Prize ceremonies and then snapped back to informality when he visited CERN on the way back home.

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@mxchara@cyberpunk.lol 2026-08-26 17:41

@bstacey@icosahedron.website @davidculley@hachyderm.io I think he has "cool teacher syndrome" and that's a really bad trait to have if you're gonna be sold to the world and the general public as the living avatar of Caltech's collective physics genius. The "cool teachers" are the ones who leave their students walking out thinking "wow cool teacher" and not thinking about the actual subject.

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