Do we like Richard Feynman?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A fearless truth-teller and great teacher, held back by his own memoir words about women and reports of selfish, sometimes cruel behaviour.
Nothing new on him lately: Feynman died in 1988, so this is a legacy check, not a news story. He was born in 1918 and raised in Queens, New York, a gifted maths and science kid. He worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, later regretted the bomb being used on Japan, then taught at Cornell before settling at Caltech for the rest of his career. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics, and his books with Ralph Leighton, like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, were bestsellers.
His finest hour was the 1986 Challenger inquiry. Reagan put him on the Rogers Commission and he was reluctant, but he went. Frustrated by vague answers, he dunked a piece of O-ring material in a cup of ice water at a hearing to show it lost its resilience in the cold. He also accused NASA of “playing Russian roulette” with astronauts, and wrote his own appendix ending that “Nature cannot be fooled”. The commission chairman reportedly complained about him, which tells you he wasn't there to be polite.
As a teacher he was the real deal. He knocked back an offer from the University of Chicago that would have roughly doubled his salary, because Caltech kept him stimulated. His two-year course for beginners became The Feynman Lectures on Physics, and he once gave an impromptu talk to about 3,000 kids. His line to Caltech graduates was that “you must not fool yourself”, and he mostly lived by it.
Now the bit that ages badly. In his memoir he wrote of an Albuquerque nightclub, “I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches.” A Caltech student essay says, citing his memoir and James Gleick's biography, that he reportedly posed as a student at Cornell to get undergraduates into bed and drew nude portraits of women, many of them students. Those are the essayist's claims from published books, not a complaint or a court case. Critics call this sexist, and a Freakonomics Radio episode describes him as selfish and sometimes cruel, especially to women.
On the harm test, here's the honest gap: he died decades before today's culture wars, and we found no words of his on LGBTQ+ or trans people, migrants, vaccines or the climate. Nor is there any pattern of working with people who push harm. Even a fair-minded defender, writing in Scientific American, concedes some of his behaviour was clearly wrong, but argues he was typical of postwar men and did not discriminate professionally. He also cites Feynman's aid to a female Caltech professor's discrimination suit, which is that author's account.
On the nice side, he was blunt but fair. At Los Alamos anyone could challenge anyone, and when he found a mistake in a colleague's work he reportedly apologised repeatedly. He had no patience for people faking knowledge or for public-relations spin, and the Challenger work cost him friction rather than winning him friends. That's courage that actually cost him something.