Richard Feynman’s legacy is has been discussed recently in regards to the fact that he was kind of a womanizing, sexist jerk, and what this fact means for how we judge his scientific work. Richard Feynman, among modern physical scientists, is hailed as sort of a God who walked the Earth. He was instrumental in formulating quantum field theory and interpreting quantum mechanics, was an excellent lecturer and teacher, providing good analogies and qualitative understanding of phenomena. He also spent much of his spare time going to bars to pick up women, picking up undergrads at orientation parties, and other sexual exploits (details can be found in his autobiographical books like “Surely You’re Joking” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think”). He was also kind of condescending to “lesser” fields such as psychology and the humanities.
Is this relevant? At some level, yes. Hailing Feynman as a hero among physical scientists inherently includes his personal life, which we should try to denounce for what it was. Many young scientists will read about his personal life and think how cool he was, and this can only lead to more gender disparities in the physical sciences, and the feeling that physical sciences maintain a culture of machismo, hostile to women, homosexuals, and some minorities. (As a note, my high school physics teacher talked about how awesome Feynman was for picking up women in bars. I did not realize it at the time, but that attitude is definitely hostile towards women in science, and women as anything more than sexual conquests in general.)
Feynman did come from a different time, so maybe we should cut him some slack on that front, but we should be able to realize that and say that that behavior is unacceptable in today’s world. Should this discount his purely scientific legacy? Absolutely not. His work was fundamental and instrumental in our understanding of quantum mechanics, the modern foundation of, well, a lot (solid-state computers, among other things).
Plenty of other individuals have had personalities that today we would find despicable, and plenty of us today do things that 50 years from now might be frowned upon. If we discount accomplishments based on whether the accomplisher is a jerk, progress would halt (I do not know the details, but we would maybe have to remove the wheel, or Kepler’s laws, or the literary works of Hemingway from human knowledge). An advancement is an advancement, regardless of the personality of the discoverer, and we need to accept that.
Should we take measures to prevent some of these personal attitudes in the future? Of course. We can even hold people like Feynman up as people not to be emulated terms of personal life. We all have personal lives and professional lives, and we often want to keep them separate (though it is becoming more difficult these days). When discussing Feynman (or Einstein, or Hawking, or any other number of jerks who happen to be doing good science), focus on the science only. When doing outreach and mentioning these individuals, focus only on their scientific work. Then perhaps their legacies will be limited to scientific exploits, not personal ones. If you need to mention personal exploits, discuss within the context why they are not to be emulated. (Discussions along these lines also help in getting across concepts of privilege, which needs help to be acknowledged by many people.)
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