I've watched large sections of this video before, because it gets posted often. It's a 2-year-old video.

Based on that viewing, I think the author has a chip on her shoulder about Feynman, and is dismissive about his teaching and books, and is set on convicting him of being a very naughty boy.

One of the things that stand out from the video: The speaker says that Feynman didn't write the Feynman lectures. Wrong. He wrote and delivered the lectures. If you go to Caltech's Feynman lectures website, they even have audio of him delivering the lectures [0] and photographs of the chalk board [1]. How could someone make a 3-hour-long video about Feynman and not even know this?

Feynman was an immensely gifted physicist and one of the most (maybe the most) engaging and innovative physics teachers of the last century. You can criticize him for embellishing stories about himself, but those stories are incredibly entertaining and quirky, which is why so many people like them. He was a big personality, and it comes out in his stories. He wasn't a perfect person, but no one is, and there has been a movement in the last few years to try to demonize him (mostly unsuccessfully, given Feynman's continued popularity).

Finally, if one makes a video with a title like, "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman," one can't complain about getting pushback.

0. https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/recordings.html

1. https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html

▲

renhanxue 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> The speaker says that Feynman didn't write the Feynman lectures. Wrong.

No, she's right, just talking about a different thing.

"The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is a physics textbook. [0] He did prepare his own lecture material, but he did not write the book.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...

▲

DiogenesKynikos 12 hours ago | parent [-]

No, she's absolutely wrong about this. The book is based very closely on Feynman's lectures. He wrote the material and gave the lectures. Other people edited that material into book form, but Feynman did the lion's share of the work.

Saying that Feynman didn't write the book is just dishonest, unless you immediately clarify afterwards that Feynman did indeed write almost all of the material in the book, in something very close to its final form.

	▲	dtartarotti 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You should watch the whole video. From memory, the video author claims that the books are not based directly on the recordings nor on material that Feynman wrote himself, but rather on lecture notes written by another professor who had to cover for Feynman (who is also listed as one of the authors in the book). She also mentions how those lecture notes from this other professor correct some small mistakes Feynman made in some calculations and diagrams from the lecture. Her claim is that Feynman was not the person who actually wrote the text of the book.
	▲	srean 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Seems she isn't interested in dragging a bit of fame and recognition her way. It's a low effort way to do that when the other party cannot defend himself.