Silbakor
A meandering commentary on the World at Large.
5.12.2005
Richard Feynman. Not merely brilliant, but one of the world's greatest communicators of science as well.
'This is how science is done'
A great article, with some excerpts from a new anthology of letters he wrote, available from Amazon:
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman
Here's a great website of all sorts of books & information on Dr. Feynman:
Basic Feynman
update:
Having just finished reading that first article (I was sidetracked by a wonderful video which you can find through the Basic Feynman link), I just had to say a little more. First, that it is enormously to our (and by our, I mean the entire world's) disfortune that there are no longer (to the best of my knowledge) any people such as Dr. Feynman, and like him Dr. Carl Sagan, who were not only brilliant men of science and great standing in society, but who could also speak of science, what it means, and what it does, and how it works, in layman's terms. I believe that this could be a large part of the problem we're currently facing, with an administration which disregards science, except when it shows the answers they're looking for; with large parts of the country (see Kansas) working actively for the retreat of real science in schools with the advancement of intelligent design over the theory of evolution; with the modern media which believes that it must needs give equal weight and time to all sides of a given argument, no matter the actual weight or value to those sides, without commenting on that relationship.
We in the United States are rolling back down the hill of enlightenment which we've toiled so hard to climb up, partly by design, but partly also I believe because we're running short on people of eloquence on whose backs we've reached our current heights.
Let us hope, for all our sakes, that someone of Feynman or Sagan's ilk, and talents, will make him or herself known, and that right soon.
