<p>QM - I have really unfortunate news for you. Richard Feynman means absolutely nothing to me. I never heard the name before I came to CC, and I don’t really care about him one way or the other, except in the general sense I wish him well, in case he’s still alive, and I’m not even all that interested in wikipedia-ing the guy to find out whether he is alive or dead. So enough with perseverating on him, already. </p>
<p>And if Richard Feynman hadn’t done whatever-his-thing-is-that-he-did-that-is-so-incredible-that-I-should-know-about, then you would never know. Just like there is probably some genius sitting in a ghetto someplace that if he only had the resources would have cured cancer and solved world peace. All this ruing about what could have been. It’s insane. </p>
<p>We may not know for sure, but there are thousands and posts from official adcoms and MIT bloggers on the other forum to clarify how admissions are run.</p>
<p>What exactly do you think MIT was like before all these new admissions policies were put into place? What sort of “multi-faceted campus environment” exists today that didn’t exist in the past?</p>
<p>Well, PG, The short version is that Feynman is dead and he liked to play the bongos and go to strip clubs. He did make some great advances in physics along the way in his spare time though.</p>
<p>Right, PG, you could start with my post #927, or part way through that, where Feynman disappears.</p>
<p>He is dead now. He died of stomach cancer about 1989 or 1990, probably connected with the fact that he was at Los Alamos during WW II.</p>
<p>Caltech held a blood drive, because he needed a lot of blood for his surgeries, before he died. They got an overwhelming response. Many people loved him.</p>
<p>I think it is true that he was the greatest American-born scientist since J. W. Gibbs.</p>
<p>I do worry about the loss of human potential, and the impact that has on all of us, when people who might make great contributions are born into unfortunate circumstances–all over the world. Maybe future generations will be wiser about making excellent educations more accessible.</p>
<p>And even though I generally agree with a lot of what QM says, on Feynman we diverge. I think he’s exactly the kind of scientist whose personality should have held him out of “top schools” because he was just so classist and sexist, even for his time.</p>
<p>It is true that people at Caltech lionize him. That says IMO more about Caltech than about Feynman.</p>
<p>The record is out there; RF wrote many autobiographical books that are very accessible and quick reads. The presence of classist/sexist/racist/anti-semitic scientists in important small labs means that we get the side-lining of other geniuses - like Rosalind Franklin.</p>
<p>"I don’t think QM ever once said that Greg Genius was (a) judging his own genius or (b) reacting with great depression/anger to not being admitted to MIT. "</p>
<p>Not in this thread, fretfulmother - but in previous threads, QM has given examples of Greg Geniuses (Genii?) who up and left science because being rejected by MIT meant that they weren’t the best, and they couldn’t possibly go on. I’m unsure whether those were real life examples or hypotheticals. </p>
<p>“I do worry about the loss of human potential, and the impact that has on all of us, when people who might make great contributions are born into unfortunate circumstances–all over the world. Maybe future generations will be wiser about making excellent educations more accessible.”</p>
<p>Indeed, Going to CMU instead of MIT just isn’t even remotely an unfortunate circumstance. </p>
<p>PG, #949: Right, it isn’t. CMU and MIT consider each other peer institutions. So I could add them to the list of “top” schools for engineers, and then my previous analysis applies.</p>
<p>PG, #948: Those were actually collegealum314’s examples. I don’t know them, and I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe they rebounded. If so, they are probably grad students or post-docs at “top” schools now, given the timing.</p>
<p>I have never had a close-up view of Caltech, so I have to defer to fretfulmother on that.</p>
<p>With regard to Feynman, I am inclined not to judge him harshly on personal grounds, because he lost his high school girlfriend, who became his first wife and whom he truly loved. I think he also blamed himself for not stepping in with diagnostic questions sooner. It might have done some good. Some of his “wise guy” actions show questionable judgment, in my opinion. I had forgotten the thing about the tips. That’s just mean.</p>
<p>How much do we apply today’s expectations to the past? On a personal level, Feynman encouraged the scientific interests of his younger sister Joan, who became a distinguished astrophysicist (<a href=“Joan Feynman - Wikipedia”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman</a>)
even though her mother and grandmother discouraged her from going into science.</p>
<p>He doesn’t seem to have had the sort of views that James Watson did of Rosalind Franklin, and Watson and Feynman were roughly contemporaries. (I checked, and Feynman died in 1988.)</p>
<p>I don’t know any women who took physics from him at Caltech, or were members of his research group. In the years that he taught the introductory undergrad physics course, Caltech did not admit women. So the discrimination reached all the way up, institutionally.</p>
<p>By “on personal grounds,” in #951, I mean “on the grounds of his personal life.”</p>
<p>Do you have ideas, PG, on how to help young people growing up in Ferguson, MO, or many similar places, to gain access to an excellent education? I’d guess the local schools there fall short of that, although I do not doubt that there are many sincere and dedicated teachers there.</p>
<p>Many universities had separate schools for women in earlier eras (or did not have anything for women at all) so Caltech is not unique in that. My late MIL (born in 1920) taught biology at CMU’s women’s college at the time, Margaret Morrison . Her older sister had a PhD in biology and their father was a physician so women even in earlier generations did study the sciences but not at the levels they do today. But women in general certainly are still underrepresented in science, math, engineering,etc. Definitely seem to be more women in medicine these days but many more boys than girls still seem interested in engineering. But even with that there are more girls getting exposed to engineering, math, science all the time.</p>
<p>QM, Re: Ferguson, Missouri. That is a totally different discussion and not sure anyone wants to go down some other tangent on that. All I will add about that is that my kids went from K-12 in a very diverse city public school system. The resources are there for most kids in any school system but kids bring different things, education level of parents, SES, etc. to the table from the beginning.</p>
<p>I don’t think Caltech had any sister college. Perhaps Scripps, among the Claremont Colleges? Divided many ways as a sister college?</p>
<p>Yes, I agree that Ferguson is a tangent on this thread. Sorry. Maybe we could shift to the public K-12 schools in Washington, DC or New York City–or perhaps have the discussion on another thread entirely? Just as a brief comment here, I think it will take a lot of resources and a lot of social innovation to provide true educational access to those students. There are some admirable initiatives out there, and some very effective schools. In many cases, their success hinges on individual inspired leaders, or multiple individuals, but it’s not especially generalizable. Some arrangements remove students from their home environment, to go to boarding schools. That seems to me to be asking a lot of the students–though I am sure that some of them thrive with that arrangement.</p>
<p>I think the No Child Left Behind law was a good-hearted, bipartisan initiative, but it didn’t fit reality in the field. Isn’t this the year that 100% of the students are supposed to be proficient?</p>
<p>For most people, it is not all about academics . I wanted my kids to be happy and productive and so far, so good although you never know what the future might bring. Some kids are born scholars, others are not . Many people have wonderful skills in other areas. My kids have friends they went to high school and college with that are currently in the NFL , Minor League baseball, acting in LA, Broadway, a chef in Brooklyn. in addition they have friends that are working as engineers, scientists,lawyers consultants, media specialists, etc… It’s all over the map and that’s okay because most human beings have a sense of what they’re good at and tend to gravitate in that direction. It truly has never been or ever will be all about physics.</p>
<p>Women in STEM: We do have to give credit to the place that is the Pinnacle of Existence - MIT had women as far back as their first class starting in 1861. (Harvard, not until 100 years later, not sure how Radcliffe figures into that number.)</p>
<p>It is true that more boys currently go into engineering fields, and we have to remember that this “choice” is in a context where the decks are still stacked against girls and women at all levels in that process, both institutionally and socially. It can seem that girls succeed more in the classroom, and indeed they do in the liberal arts all the way through college, but we still have a lot of progress to make in STEM.</p>
<p>I just had a conversation with students about why it might be alienating to girls, for a boy to have as his “profile signature” something like, “number theory is more beautiful than all the girls in [Mathy activity] combined”. Realizing that anecdotes are not data, we can also look at the national numbers for things like girls in AP-CS.</p>
<p>SES as a problem for educational access: Absolutely. In my school, we do have a busing integration program, as well as several grants and initiatives. It’s a long road. I had one minority student who was eating lunch outside after a science review session, and she came back inside because some random white woman kept giving her the stink-eye and she felt like she was being accused of loitering [at the track outside her own school]. We have faculty who are minority and who have been pulled over for DWB (“driving while black” - refers to AA drivers being pulled over with much higher frequency in wealthy neighborhoods).</p>
<p>The national figures for young women in AP-CS are terrible, as far as I recall. I think the last woman on the U.S. International Math Olympiad team was there in 2007. Some other countries have a much higher proportion of women on their IMO teams. It’s not clear why the U.S. does so poorly in that regard, although lots and lots of things like the profile signature that you mentioned, fretfulmother, no doubt take their cumulative toll. </p>
<p>I don’t think anything is “all about physics.” I mentioned a while back that I thought there were somewhere between 100 and 300 [developed, well-educated] high-level geniuses per cohort [+ an unknown number who haven’t had a chance to develop their talents pre-college]. That includes musicians, writers, artists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, economists, scientists of all types, engineers, and entrepreneurs, as well as people in finance and other business fields, and people. I didn’t mean it’s 6 mathematicians + 94 to 294 physicists!</p>
<p>The comments that you have made about SES, race (and gender), fretfulmother, could be repeated in any number of contexts. Some of those problems can be ameliorated in a one-on-one basis, and I think that you are doing really valuable work of that type. I don’t have good ideas for a systemic approach. </p>
<p>“It is true that more boys currently go into engineering fields, and we have to remember that this “choice” is in a context where the decks are still stacked against girls and women at all levels in that process, both institutionally and socially. It can seem that girls succeed more in the classroom, and indeed they do in the liberal arts all the way through college, but we still have a lot of progress to make in STEM.”</p>
<p>Hmmm, so let’s see. </p>
<p>In the liberal arts, men’s and women’s talents are equally respected and developed. In STEM, men’s talents and abilities are still prioritized over women’s and there are apparently institutional and social barriers preventing women from reaching their full potential.</p>
(Harvard, not until 100 years later, not sure how Radcliffe figures into that number.)</p>