Ask Ethan: Why isn’t Richard Feynman your personal hero? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Nov, 2024

One of the 20th century’s most famous, influential, and successful physicists is lauded the world over. But Feynman is no hero to me.

The 20th century, among the many other things it brought to humanity, brought with it a series of revolutions about the Universe. Newton’s gravity was replaced with Einstein’s General Relativity: a theory that has withstood every challenge for over a century. The quantum revolution occurred, replacing a deterministic picture of reality with an indeterminate one for particles. Later on, the notion of fields was replaced with quantum ones as well, showcasing just how bizarre reality truly is. Vital figures in those developments — such as Einstein, Planck, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Fermi, Bohr, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Hawking, Weinberg, and many others — have become legendary, not only among physicists and physics students, but to the general public as well.

So why, then, don’t I, personally, esteem these figures as highly as so many others do? That’s what Bert Schuhmacher wants to know, and what he wants to know specifically about Richard Feynman, asking:

“Thank you for all your explanations about the cosmos. They are of high quality and contain comprehensive knowledge. I have…