Most student’s PHD theses... an improvement on the measurement of some extremely esoteric aspect of 2 specific particle interactions. Feynman’s PHD thesis... rewrite all of quantum electrodynamics.
@@electrictrooper7386 Maybe. I remember people claiming expert systems were just an inch from 'real intelligence', and at least two other neural net 'golden ages'. But there we have moved the needle, even if we're probably just as far from 'real intelligence' as we ever were.
@@swe1337swe Not really. That is just a lame excuse people give themselves to justify giving up or not even trying. Those people are just lazy or uninspired. One can learn anything given the motivation and time. That was me in my current field of study in University. Just two years ago I had no interest in it, and that was a few months before I started.
@@seferraziel9534 Of course not! That is a very extreme and sickening example. Also, that is a straw man argument right there. I know that people who are sadly "disadvantaged" cannot perform certain things that their disadvantage hinders them from doing. I am obviously talking about people who do have the capacity to learn and perform, but don't use it. That is a huge majority of people. There are also people who think they want to do something, but deep down they don't want to. That can also hinder them. Motivation is not something you can force, it is just something you have or get naturally. Amusia is extremely rare, though. I can't teach them music, because I did not learn how to, and I don't want to. I am sure it is difficult or impossible to teach them, it is a cognitive disorder. The only way to truly see whether or not someone legitimately cannot learn something is through a Physiologist or a diagnosis, but that can take time and patience - years of it, in fact.
@@FloatingJetsam The normal distribution does taper off in both directions. But there's an entire half of it above the mean ordinate value - and residing in that domain are two types of people with thinking ability: those who choose to think, and those who choose not to think.
Thank you so much. I need to have a copy of this on my shelf. I seek out everything I can about what Feynman thought. And even though I have had not college physics corses. Over the last ten years. I have been able to learn quite a bit. Much of it from rewatching all his lectures over and over. I owe it all to RU-vid. With out it I would have only had the choices of old fashion linear television.
In the given path, if there is a reflected wave heading towards incoming (or distorted time delayed wave), then there must be a standing wave. Standing wave make resonance, I think thats taken as energy conservation, which later considered as oscillators logically. I wonder, the Maxwell's equations are working even beyond the wavelength of a wave. At times of 1942, as a PhD student, Feynman had enough opportunity to witness the works of Einstein, Dirac, Wheeler and Chandrasekhar. Thanks friend.. Enjoyed a thesis, for the first time!!
Great overview with great highlights! For more on Lagrangians, Action, & Hamiltonians, Leonard Sussekind's "Theoretical Minimum" series of books (starting with Classical Mechanics) provides incredible explanations and return on investment!
@ProgM Funny how you're still here and find something utterly useless to write. If you're so interested in looking at something that's worth it how about you shut up about it first and actually do some work in academia for me to believe that you know better.
@apxo apxo I'm sad, sad he is not alive anymore ... would have asked him questions for his crass answers for which he has become famous or infamous for ... i only read that in Miles Mathis's expositions and Ken Wheeler's videos ... so the big nose here is a big give away ... hahaha
Ha ha , being in twelfth grade , I was able to survive till the end , understanding and enjoying few intricate derivations leading to those results which Feynman used in the thesis !
@J D he might just be lacking the fundamental knowledge to understand this, how can he be stupid if he lacks knowledge? Is einstein stupid if he couldn't understand a musical note?
Imagine being well on your way to winning a Nobel physics prize at 24. I’m 19 and I don’t even know how boats can float. Wow 1k. Literally the most attention I’ve ever amassed in any way thank you guys😂
@UCIH3siny2Q82Jn68lTJ1PJg That is not entirely true because the lift force is equal to d.v, d being the density of the liquid and v being the volume of the object's part that is sunk in the liquid. Let's say we have a ship that has a mass of m. If mg = d.v than the boat floats. So let's say you added some mass to the ship, people. The density of water and the gravitational acceleration stays the same, but the total mass of the ship increases, so v has to increase as well. It sinks even more to float. If you added more and more people to the ship, it will sink completely because the force caused by his mass will be larger than the maximum lift force the water can provide which is basically the entire boat's volume times the density of water. So yeah the total weight of the ship matters. But if we are talking about the literal mass the boat has, than yes; it won't change anything because as you increase the mass you also increase the v as the density of the ship is consistent. I know what you meant and this comment is useless but it is 2 am and I am bored being home so please excuse me.
Thank you! I just read the wonderful book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and in it he discusses writing this paper as if he were taking a quick break between other really important projects! XD
Most of the humans are at that age, don't be frustrated because of that, and above all don't make the mistake of comparing yourself to anyone but yourself.
Einstein failed his college entrance exams. Einstein failed a physics class in college. Einstein graduated in the bottom 20% of his class. Einstein didn’t get a job in academia until 4 years after his miracle year. 4 years after his special theory of relativity, 4 years after photons, a university finally was like “yeah. Let’s hire that guy”
Oh damn thanks tibees, like i have no clue about physics but you make it somewhat undestandable and I actually unterstood the general topic, like whattt. Thanks tibees :)
I'm a math PhD, and working from home has been a challenge but this was nice motivation to start my day with. I'm now fired up. Could you do John Nash's 26 page thesis next?
I just commented a second ago about Nash’s thesis 😂. It’s so fantastic that I’ve had a printed copy in my study for re-reading for like 1.5-2 years now. It’s a mess now though.
@@pokeman123451 I'm shocked he has managed to write a 26 page thesis. But I suppose that is a testament to how original it must be. I haven't read it myself. But I've seen PhD thesis's where the introduction and review chapters are close to 100 pages.
Incredible! Making so many connections at such a young age! One can only dream of being so intelligent and creative. Great video thank you for taking the time to understand his paper.
That's why our parent's fingers, at average, were thicker than our generation onwards. I have noticed that, and I am pretty sure it works in your state or country too.
Thank you, Tibees, for posting this! Seeing it, I firmly believe that the Feynman thesis should be covered in every graduate level QM series. Most doctoral theses are best mothballed after the degree is awarded - but this is Richard Feynman, after all! An amazing (and curious) character. It also helped that his advisor, John Wheeler, was quite an amazing character himself. Fred
this is great!!! Very grateful people are still remembering Feynman. He was a pure genius, all the way in his life. He was that elementary school kid scanning trigonometry textbooks to the 24-year-old with a Nobel prize. I will always remember Feynman's joyful personality especially in times like this.
This is really interesting! Thanks. It never would have occurred to me to try and read his PhD thesis, ... I would have assumed it would be far too technical. I love the substitution arguments, "Oh, you just replace the classical real valued variable with this complex exponential and then it turns out, ..." That was how Schrödinger came up with the wave equation wasn't it?
I studied the history of science while attending the U of F and I am always amazed at the way some people can see so clearly a different way to explain reality. Now u understanding the thesis you found. Nope. Way beyond me. Thank you for offering it up to us. :-)
I miss those days, when i only interested in physics, and think about the physics problems deeply in every walk of my life. In high school i came for the school only to see and read the feynman lectures on physics. I am not even bothered about the year end exams. And i continually researched so many articles. It was continued. But after graduation in physics. I miserably failed entrance exam for Masters in physics. Really a painful day for me. Now i quit physics, officially but not in my heart and soul. Thanks for uploading this video.
You are very good at condensing complex concepts and then explaining it to an audience member who doesn't specialise in the given field. I would have liked to have a look at Feynman's thesis, but would have been worried I wouldn't understand much. But thanks to this video, I was able to have another glimpse into that legend's thinking ways. Now I want to read it and understand it in depth :)
This again show that classical mechanics is the most important branch in theoretical physics. Lagrangians, hamiltonians and noethers theorem are so powerful
9:00 Imagine if more teachers would notice board students and said, "Let me tell you about something you might find interesting?" I wonder how many Richard Feynman level intellects we have lost to history simply because no teacher noticed they were board. How many amazing advances have been late (or lost) because the brain that could have made them was inside the head of some poor, unnoticed child?
13:41 Hey, I drew that diagram! (for Wikipedia, so using it is fair game). I see the Wikipedia editors have replaced it on the most recent version of the page, because they wanted to draw it as a space-time diagram (my version wasn't intended as such), and generally in QM, the paths don't loop backward in time. But, actually, in Feynman's path integrals for relativistic particles, he DID have them going forward and backward in time--at least, in the version of the theory that shows up in Feynman and Hibbs' book on the subject. It's funny that young Feynman was motivated by the desire to get rid of fields in QED, when these days, his path integral formulation is usually used *with* fields. Instead of integrating that complex exponential of the action over all paths of particles through space-time, you integrate over all possible space-time evolutions of the whole field.
It's interesting that the usual approach to QM is via the Hamiltonian, which is kind of the conjugate of the Lagrangian. So, just make a Hilbert space out of either one, and boom! you have QM. Or else, sum up every possible path, like Feynman did. I wish I could understand what I just wrote here.
I watched this video on your excellent channel for the first time today. Then I came across your video about giving up your PhD. PhD's are not for everyone and you are in good company. Listen to the comments that Professor Freeman Dyson made, in his interviews on RU-vid, about how stifling PhD programmes are. I'm sure you know, but Dyson was (he died in Feb this year) a really big hitter mathmatician who took over teaching the Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics course Princeton... , and Dyson did not have a PhD! He resolved some of Feynman's loose ends and wrote lots of text books etc.. Like Dyson, you are taking 'the path less trodden' and like him you will have a rich and fulfilling career. Stay brave and be happy. Good luck!
Please be careful about history. Feynman did not come up with the principle of least action in classical mechanics. It existed hundreds of years before Feynman, and was discovered by Hamilton, Euler, Lagrange and others. After all it's called the Lagrangian! Feynman was inspired by a comment in Diracs book regarding the extension of least action to QM. So even the idea of extending to QM was not original to Feynman, but Dirac,
Thanks much for such a good presentation. The path integral approach is set forth in the book "Quantum mechanics and path integrals" by Feynman and Hibbs. You may also find Freeman Dyson's discussion of the part that it played in Feynman's later triumphs--- the RU-vid video has the title "Freeman Dyson -Talking physics with Feynman: path integrals (71/157)."
Hold on a second, I think I have some wallet size pics of mine with me, not sure though, it looked so much better digital...i have an 8x10 somewhere...there was a class picture but they all look the same
@@SilhSe I am sure more people noticed, like me. But you are not allow to say anything nice to ladies anymore, without being accused of sexist and risking 6 months jail sentence on top of that.
I found Paul Dirac's Thesis on Quantum Mechanics much more fascinating!! Due to the fact that it is more fundamental and my own bias of loving powerful mathematics used in understanding the Mathematical structure of the universe.
Stay safe yourself. Hopefully the scientists will find a vaccine soon. Maybe you could do a video on vaccinations in the future and science behind it. 🙂👍
9:30 Nitpick: only in cartesian coordinates is the kinetic energy solely a function of the velocities. Sorry, it's what I do. Edit: this is an extremely interesting concept to me. Thank you for your wonderful video!
Stealthought;What are you implying? Many of the great German physicists of the 20's and 30's had mistresses! Morally bankrupt ridiculous!!It was just further evidence -not proof - a stiff penis has no conscience The Nazis's were morally bankrupt and they deservedly paid the price.Trump is a better example but he has yet to pay the price
Thanks! I'm still trying to understand how least action will give a parabolic trajectory of a ball being tossed across the room. Feynman understood this while he was still in high school! That high school teacher probably never knew it would be part of Feynman's PhD thesis later. Must of have been a great teacher, too!
I graduated just in time, in December 2019. I aquired a bachelors degree in music (highest score in my promotion). And i’ve been growing and learning ever since!
i am a chemist and i dont understand at all this thesis. I think Feynman didn't understand this theory either so he rewrote something that made sense to him, he had a fire under his but he had to earn his PHD. he said there is more ways to describe nature,. might be right but in other fields you cannot rewrite the basic theory, you just have to learn it and understand it.
Although I don’t have a good grasp on the subject matter I still find these videos entertaining. Her calming demeanor is a welcome distraction from the chaos happening in the world right now. Lots of love from America ❤️
My respect for sir feynman,tesla and ramanujam is far greater than anyone not just for their works but for their kind nature. I still regret for not being born at times when Feynman was an amazing teacher. Thank you tibees for making such an amazing video. You made my day.
