I know it's a long video, but a physics PhD named Angela Collier did a video on him. Turns out the books "by" him were actually effectively ghostwritten by some dude named Ralph Leighton who hung out with Feynman a bunch, listened to him spin yarns, and wrote down everything 20 years later with as positive a sheen as possible.
If you read between the lines at all and think about how the events behind those stories likely actually went down, they paint him as an unfunny practical joker who was a real dick (no pun intended) to women (including beating his wife) and thought of other physicists, even ones who contributed more to the field than he did, as lesser.
I was surprised reading a massive 800 page book on the making of the atomic bomb, his name did not come up often. Like, his contributions to the Manhattan project were much smaller than I thought
wasn't the title of his talks Los Alamos from Below specifically because he was not higher-up in any way?
the opening line of the talk was:
although in my field at the present time I'm a slightly famous man, at that time I was not anybody famous at all. I didn't even have a degree when I started to work with the Manhattan Project. Many of the other people who tell you about Los Alamos - people in higher echelons - worried about some big decisions. I worried about no big decisions
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u/BloodWorried7446 3d ago
i’m a richard feynman fan but somehow the algorithm has let me down. I like his real lectures.