90 Minutes With Richard Feynman

The name Richard Feynman should at least sound familiar, if not because of his work in physics then because his zombie is such a big fan of the Mythbusters. Either way, the BBC Horizon documentary “Richard Feynman-No Ordinary Genius” is well worth your time, and deserves more than the mere 150,000 views it has garnered.

Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, Feynman was a talented thinker, teacher, and speaker–the essential skill set of any science rock star. But the video makes it clear that Feynman’s greatest gift was his unique, even eccentric personality, which allowed him to approach difficult scientific problems in new ways.

Feynman was profoundly curious, a nature that extended well beyond his academic specialty. After becoming friends with artist Jirayr Zorthian, Feynman spent eight years trading him physics lessons for drawing instruction, eventually becoming an accomplished draftsman. Looking at Feynman’s work in physics, his interest in art is no surprise; despite studying a highly conceptual field, he was clearly a visual thinker.

In the second half of the video, Physicist David Goodstein relates how Feynman once reduced a complex problem by thinking it through in physical terms. He also invented the “Feynman Diagram,” a simple, visual way to explain the math of subatomic particles.

The documentary touches on the most notable points of Feynman’s career: his work on the atomic bomb and resulting guilt over its use, his important role investigating the Challenger explosion, his Nobel Prize and seeming indifference to it. But the overall theme found in “No Ordinary Genius” is that brilliance isn’t just a matter of intelligence, it comes from thinking about the world in unique ways.

Source : geek

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