Name: No Ordinary Genius
ISBN: 9780393036213

No Ordinary Genius

If Richard Feynman had not existed it would not be possible to create him. The most extraordinary scientist of his time, a unique combination of dazzling intellect and touching simplicity, Feynman had a passion for physics that was merely the Nobel Prize-winning part of an immense love of life and everything it could offer. He was hugely irreverent and always completely honest - with himself, with his colleagues, and with nature. "People say to me, 'Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?' No, I'm not. I'm just looking to find out more about the world, and if it turns out there is a simple ultimate law that explains everything, so be it. That would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers, and we're sick and tired of looking at layers, then that's the way it is....My interest in science is to simply find out more about the world, and the more I find out the better it is. I like to find out.". This intimate, moving, and funny book traces Feynman's remarkable adventures inside and outside science, in words and in more than one hundred photographs, many of them supplied by his family and close friends. The words are often his own and those of family, friends, and colleagues such as his sister, Joan Feynman; his children, Carl and Michelle; Freeman Dyson, Hans Bethe, Daniel Hillis, Marvin Minsky, and John Archibald Wheeler.

What Hacker News says

turtleyachtNov 2022

DDD sounds amazing, but y'all the pull requests are usually a dozen files with tiny changes. At least from what I have seen.

And the promise is "change is easy" or "impact to existing code is low." This may be true. Is it?

I have the Evans book. It may completely change the way I write code. But I also have "C Interfaces and Implementations," and that promises another. Yet another is Stepanov's "Elements of Programming," which by first chapter's end Feynman is telling me to read it again [1].

We just want to make Good Decisions about the code, right? Strategically (architectures) and tactically (pure functions).

I wonder if domain stuff surfaces naturally in SQL. Tables as types and subtypes. "Now build an app around me" feels like a different take from the usual "Now we just need the persistence layer."

[1] No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman

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johnoharaJul 2010

One of my favorites:

Dick acted as a consultant for a company in Switzerland, which took him there every summer. About 1982 or so, I had business in Europe, and I met Dick in Geneva. We decided to kick around for several days. We did the shops and the countryside on the first day, and on the second day, he asked what I'd like to do. I said, "Well, if it isn't too much like a postman's holiday, I'd like to go over to CERN," which is the European particle accellerator, where so much particle physics is done, and where Dick used to work a number of years before. He said, "Sure." So we went over there, and Dick couldn't find his way around because the buildings had changed. We finally found our way in, and looked into a room where there were some physicists doing work on the blackboard. One of them spotted Feynman, and pretty soon there was a crowd gathered, and the director came in. He decided they'd take us on a tour. We went into a 007, James Bond cave underneath the ground, with all this wonderful high-technology equipment. There was a giant machine that was going to be rolled into the line of the particle accelerator. The machine was maybe the size of a two-story building, on tracks, with lights and bulbs and dials and scaffolds all around, with men climbing all over it.

Feynman said, "What experiment is this?"

The director said, "Why this is an experiment to test the change-change something-or-other under such-and-such circumstances." But he stopped suddenly, and he said, "I forgot! This is your theory of change-change, Dr. Feynman! This is an experiment to demonstrate, if we can, your theory of fifteen years ago, called so-and-so." He was a little embarrassed at having forgotten it.

Feynman looked at this big machine, and he said, "How much does this cost?" The man said, "Thirty-seven million dollars," or whatever it was.

And Feynman said, "You don't trust me?"

-- excerpted from "No Ordinary Genius" by Christopher Sykes

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