The Fantastic Mr Feynman

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This is probably the most comprehensive of the Richard Feynman documentaries.

I rank it #3 on my list of The 10 Best Richard Feynman Documentaries.

I give a big joyful thanks to Tim Ferriss for first pointing “Feynman”The Fantastic Mr Feynman” out on his podcast. Tim calls it “my favorite documentary of one of my favorite people…”

Trailer for “The Fantastic Mr Feynman”

Watch “The Fantastic Mr Feynman”

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Here’s the full list of links I’ve found to watch The Fantastic Mr Feynman on:

None of the major streaming services (Netflix, Max, Hulu, Disney+, etc.) currently stream The Fantastic Mr Feynman. But check back here to see if any of them add it: https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/the-fantastic-mr-feynman

Ratings:

  • My Rating: 92/100
  • IMDB Rating: 7.7/10
  • Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: na (what the f**k — how could Rotten Tomatoes not rank this Feynman doc yet!).

Release Date: May 12, 2013

Review of “The Fantastic Mr Feynman”

I love this Feynman doc as I do most videos that is centered around Feynman. They’re all great!

There’s some overlap with “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out” (the 1981 interview of Feynman on the Horizon show on BBC) (e.g. Feynman’s stories about his dad (the T-Rex story and the one about the bias people have when they see men in uniform); and also about the Los Alamos Atomic Bomb test).

But “The Fantastic Mr Feynman” brings those interview clips more to life through fun visuals.

Note: There’s al almost identical version of “The Fantastic Mr Feynman” called “Feynman: The Challenger” (the main difference is the former is narrated by a Brit and the latter by an American).

Instead of my normal review, I’m testing out using transcripts.

For this one, I got the transcript from SubSaga and then asked ChatGPT to reformat it with sub-headers.

Ping me about whether this was useful for you.

Modified Transcript of “The Fantastic Mr Feynman”

For this one, I got the transcript from SubSaga and then asked ChatGPT to reformat it with sub-headers.

Then I cleaned it up a bit (e.g. shorter paragraphs).

Ping me about useful this is for you (versus me just writing a 500 word review)

Here it is:

Introduction (0:00) Richard Feynman was one of the most extraordinary scientists of the 20th century. As a brilliant physicist, he pioneered an entirely new area of his subject. He discovered a new law of nature, something only a very few people did. The most numerically precise physical theory ever invented.

Contributions to History and Science (0:33) Feynman’s brilliance helped shape history. As a young man, he helped to build the atom bomb, ending the Second World War. Throughout his life, Feynman rejected authority and refused to conform. He preferred to follow his passions—from bongo playing to biology, from poetry to painting, from computing to cracking safes.

Infectious Enthusiasm (1:18) Above all, Feynman’s infectious enthusiasm for life captivated millions of readers and viewers. “Feynman’s been a showman pretty much his whole life. Any room he walked into, everyone is looking at him. He was the center of attention.”

Growing Up (2:21) Richard Phillips Feynman was born on the 11th May 1918, during the Depression, to working-class parents living on the outskirts of New York. Even when I was a small boy, Poppa used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He would read, say, about dinosaurs. It was very exciting and interesting to think that there were animals of such magnitude.

Early Experiments and Influences (3:28) By the age of ten, Richard had his own science laboratory at home, where he tinkered with old radios and experimented with physics. He hired me, for four cents a week, as his lab assistant, to amaze his friends. There was a spark gap with voltage against it…and if you put your finger in, you get a shock. Their father, Melville Feynman, worked for a company which made uniforms.

Academic Achievements (4:47) At the age of 17, Feynman won a maths competition in New York. In 1935, he was awarded a place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. But away from home for the first time, he was going to miss more than just his family. From MIT, Feynman moved to Princeton, achieving full marks in the maths and physics entrance exam—an unprecedented feat.

Personal Challenges and Love (5:50) But back home, things weren’t as perfect. The family went away for a spring vacation with Arline. My father saw this lump on Arline’s neck and said to her, “What is that?” It was the tuberculosis.

The Manhattan Project (7:00) Feynman was asked if he wanted to join a top-secret project based in a Government laboratory at Los Alamos, in New Mexico. Code-named Manhattan, its objective was to build an atom bomb. The fear was that Germany would invent such a terrifying new weapon first and use it to win the war. Feynman became a member of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

Innovations in Calculations (8:54) Despite being surrounded by extraordinary physicists, the challenge of developing an atom bomb so quickly was an enormous undertaking. One fundamental problem was the sheer volume of calculations required. Without computers, it had to be done manually, slowing progress enormously. That was, until Feynman arrived.

Maverick Misadventures (10:04) Despite being a key member of the most secret Government project of the war, Feynman’s streak of maverick mischief was never far away. ‘So I used to pick the locks all the time and point out that it was very easy to do. Between safecracking and doing physics calculations, the pace of life at Los Alamos was relentless. In a sanatorium nearby, his wife Arline was confined to her bed, slowly dying of her disease.

Post-War Reflections (11:19) Then, in the aftermath of his grief, Feynman was forced to confront the reality of what he had helped create. ‘They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. ’20 miles away, you are not going to see a damn thing through dark glasses. ‘Well, I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes, bright light never can hurt your eyes, is ultraviolet light that does.

Rediscovering the Joy of Physics (14:20) In the months after this double trauma—first, losing his wife, then, realizing the destruction he’d helped unleash, Feynman was thrown into darkness. Maybe from just the bomb itself, and maybe for some other psychological reasons, I had just lost my wife. I was really in a kind of depressive condition. In the autumn of 1945, Feynman was invited to become a professor in the Physics Department at Cornell University.

Contributions to Quantum Mechanics (16:01) Quantum Mechanics had revealed the problems of accurately predicting how atoms and their electromagnetic forces would behave. Because these are the fundamental building blocks of nature, it threw everything else into doubt too. Everything that happens around you, other than gravity, all the immediately experienceable parts of the world, are electromagnetism at work. When two atoms get together to form a molecule, that’s electromagnetism.

Innovative Thinking (18:01) A new field, called Quantum Electro-Dynamics, or QED, emerged to try to make sense of electromagnetism and sub-atomic matter. Sometimes QED seemed to work, but other times, its predictions were way off. It was all crazy; it didn’t make any sense. It gave you infinity.

Feynman Diagrams (19:01) Feynman realized that the fact the equations resulted in infinity didn’t mean they were wrong. The problem just needed to be looked at from a new perspective. He saw that there was actually a sort of pictorial way of thinking about these pictures, these equations. You could associate a little cartoon, a little Feynman diagram, as we now call them, to every one of these terms in the equation.

Nobel Prize and Beyond (21:30) Quantum Electrodynamics, which is the theory that Feynman put the finishing touches on, is the most numerically precise physical theory ever invented. In recognition of this work, in 1965, Feynman was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physics. He shared it with two other physicists, Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, who were also working on the same problem. “I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.”

Family Life (23:00) In 1959, on a trip to Europe, Feynman met Yorkshire woman Gweneth Howarth. A year later, they were married. Back in California, now Professor of Physics at Caltech, Richard and Gweneth started a family. “I got a kick, when I was a boy, of my father telling me things, so I tried to tell my son things that were interesting about the world.”

Public Engagement (25:21) Feynman’s reputation as a communicator of science was spreading around the world. In the early 1960s, he began presenting lectures for the public, which were televised. “I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. First, we guess it.”

The Feynman Lectures (27:26) Caltech invited him to re-write the physics curriculum for undergraduates. His new course, spanning the entire history of physics, became known as ‘The Feynman Lectures.’ “All these lectures had a certain amount of excitement and an element of what you might call solid showbiz demonstration.” Graduate students started idolising him, but by the 1960s his course here at Caltech was very famous.

Art and Bongo Playing (29:44) Outside science, Feynman’s interests were also flourishing. He’d become an accomplished bongo player. And he developed a love of painting and drawing, based on a close friendship with renowned Californian artist, Jirayr Zorthian. “In the end, he became a very accomplished draftsman.”

Scientific Sabbatical (31:26) In the 1960s, Feynman took a sabbatical year. Instead of heading for a different physics department the other side of the country, he simply crossed the Caltech campus to study viruses. During this time, he also became fascinated by the social structure of ants and enthralled by the potential applications of nanotechnology. “He was always guided by what seemed interesting and fun.”

Supercomputing Collaboration (32:18) In the early 1980s, his son Carl’s budding career in the emerging field of super computers proved irresistible. He signed up for a summer job at Carl’s start-up company in Boston. “Thinking Machines”, as the company was called, would go on to become a major player in the world of Parallel Super-computing. Feynman applied his methods of shortening calculations, developed in the 1940s, to the new digital age.

Playful Curiosity (33:49) As always, working with Feynman was filled with welcome distractions. “We both liked spaghetti because it was easy to cook. And I asked him why it was that when you broke a piece of spaghetti, it often broke into three pieces, instead of two. By the time the evening was over, we had broken spaghetti all over the place and we STILL didn’t know why spaghetti broke in three places.”

NASA and the Challenger Disaster (41:41) In January 1986, NASA launched its 25th space shuttle mission. It symbolized a new era of space flight by adding a school teacher called Christa McAuliffe to the crew. The loss of their space shuttle and its crew of seven, live on TV, shocked America. A Presidential Commission was hastily put together to find out what had gone wrong.

Investigating the Accident (43:02) Someone independent with unimpeachable scientific credentials was needed. “His friends were, ‘Dick, you got to go cos you’re the only guy who can cut through the bullshit!'” Feynman broke his policy and within days of the accident, he had joined the inquiry in Washington. “It was the beginning of a poor relationship with the chairman but a close friendship with the Air Force General.”

Revealing the Truth (47:02) The general needed to get information about the cold’s effect on O-rings to Feynman without compromising his source. He took Feynman to his garage and mentioned, “You know, Professor, these doggone carburettors have O-rings and they leak when they’re cold.” Feynman had his answer and decided to use the power of a classic science demonstration. “I took this stuff that I got out of your seal and I put it in ice water.”

Final Years and Legacy (52:01) Feynman had nailed, once and for all, that the cold could have been the cause of the shuttle’s failure just 73 seconds after launch. It really was a turning point in the investigation. In the summer of 1986, the Commission’s report was submitted. Feynman added a stark reminder about the limits of science: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Facing Mortality (53:03) Feynman went into hospital for the last time in February 1988. His kidneys were failing, and he decided he didn’t want to go through with dialysis to prolong his suffering. “I still sort of thought, ‘No, this isn’t the way it is.'” But he was able to handle a lot of physical difficulties as long as his mind was sharp.

A Final Gesture (54:39) When a person is dying, their hands move a little. The nurse who was there says that he’s not trying to communicate, that’s just natural. He raised his hands like this. And he went like this, which, if you know it, is the symbol that a magician gives when he’s going to do a trick.

Richard Feynman’s Death (55:14) Richard Feynman died on the 15th February 1988 in hospital in Los Angeles at the age of just 69. When I took my last walk with Richard Feynman, he was telling me a bunch of funny stories. I realized the message behind the stories was that he was about to die of cancer, and I got very sad. He said, “Yeah, that bugs me sometimes too. But not as much as you’d think.”

Enduring Legacy (56:20) Today, over 25 years since his death, Feynman’s prophecy has more truth than he could ever have imagined. Through an invention that hadn’t been created when he died, his stories do live on. “I see my father referenced in popular culture a lot more now than when he was alive.” “You hold up a flower and say, ‘Look how beautiful it is.’ And I’ll agree. But you, as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.”

Feynman and the Internet (57:32) You wonder what Feynman would have made of the internet. “And I think he would really, really like the idea that he’s spread all over the world in clips, short and long, on the internet, for maybe all time.” “It’s fantastic to just be able to Google Feynman, Richard Feynman, any kind of variation and there it is.” “You have a lot of stuff out there.”

Physics with a Human Face (58:03) I know what I’ll remember him for. For being a good brother and a good person. He wasn’t just the scientist; he wasn’t just the artist; he wasn’t just the educator. He was physics with a human face, you know.

An Important Legacy (58:28) He showed that in order to be a top-ranked physicist, you can still be a human being. I think that’s a very important legacy to people who want to do science. It’s a human endeavor, and he showed that. Has Richard Feynman inspired you to follow your own path in life?

Conclusion (59:00) Join The Open University to explore your options and find out more about how he revolutionized the face of physics. Go to: And follow the links to The Open University. Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd.

Thanks for reading!

Rob Kelly, Chief Maniac, Daily Doc

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