NaiveTortoise comments on If you’ve learned from the best, you’re doing it wrong

[NaiveTortoise]

I agree that I’d want to learn physics from him, I’m just not sure he was an exceptional physicist. Good, but not Von Neuman. He says as much in his biographies (e.g. pointing out one of his big contributions came from randomly point to a valve on a schematic and getting people to think about the schematic).

(Disclaimer: not a physicist). From what I understand, Feynman was a really really good physicist. Besides winning a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics, he also contributed to several other areas during his career. Also, if you look at what other eminent mathematicians of the time say about him, you get the sense that he was exceptional even amongst the exceptional.

For example, Mark Kac, an eminent mathematician of the time, said:

There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians.’ an ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians… Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber.

Hans Bethe (another Nobel Prize winning physicist of the time) shared similar sentiments:

As the late, great Nobel Laureate physicist Hans Bethe remarked: “Feynman was a magician. With a magician, you just do not know how he does it.”

I don’t have the time to find more quotes like this right now but I think there are a bunch more like them if you look for them.