Richard Feynman: The Likelihood of Flying Saucers

in Physics, Video - Science | August 2nd, 2011 4 Comments

Richard Feyn­man was a once in a gen­er­a­tion intel­lec­tu­al. He had no short­age of brains. (In 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quan­tum elec­tro­dy­nam­ics.) He had charis­ma. (Wit­ness this out­take from his 1964 Cor­nell physics lec­tures avail­able here.) He knew how to make sci­ence and aca­d­e­m­ic thought avail­able, even enter­tain­ing, to a broad­er pub­lic. (We’ve high­light­ed two pub­lic TV pro­grams host­ed by Feyn­man here and here.) And he knew how to have fun. The clip above brings it all togeth­er. Hope you enjoy, and don’t miss our col­lec­tion of Great Sci­ence Videos, or many free physics cours­es in our big col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.


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Comments (4)
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  • Charles Fleeman says:
    August 2, 2011 at 12:33 pm

    I’ve read a cou­ple of books by Feyn­man and watched sev­er­al videos out on the web, he was a great voice.

    Reply
  • Charles Frith says:
    August 2, 2011 at 8:23 pm

    Feyn­man was tru­ly great (and a real gent) but he also expressed the prob­a­bil­i­ty that alien life exist­ed in the uni­verse to Mar­shall Klar­feld who stud­ied under him at Cal­tech in the 50’s.

    Extrap­o­lat­ing that prob­a­bil­i­ty fur­ther it would be like­ly that there are vast­ly more devel­oped life forms than us in the Uni­verse. Good post.

    Reply
  • opica says:
    August 3, 2011 at 2:48 am

    A, but there is a dif­fer­ence between exis­tence of alien life in the uni­verse and exis­tence of fly­ing saucers, right?

    Reply
  • Andy says:
    January 22, 2022 at 1:41 pm

    I won­der what he made of Roswell Or the Wash­ing­ton DC 52’ fleet of saucers. And I guess he would sur­mise they were ‘quan­tum’ in out­look. Won­der­ful sci­en­tist.

    Reply

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