Sometimes I have the nagging feeling that everyone I idolize would leave me disappointed if I knew them personally. The further back a person is in history the more mythical he becomes
Some people might do or were something that I won't like. I have learned to not let that influence me in way, and be comfortably ambivalent.
I especially felt bad after I came to know that Richard Feynman slept with many of his friends' wives and tried to sleep with even more of them. He burnt a lot of bridges this way. One Physicist had told me that Feynman hit on his wife twice, and when discouraged by the wife, he let it go as a perfect gentleman.
Despite this, Feynman remains one of my most revered icons and his picture still hangs on my wall.
I don't overlook what he did or try to find some naive justification. I know he was this way and that does not make his mind less fascinating to me.
> Richard Feynman slept with many of his friends' wives and tried to sleep with even more of them.
If you're going to indict people for having immoral sex, you'll have to indict probably 90%. If you include trying to have immoral sex, how many would pass your test?
For me personally it's not sex or even immoral sex, it's betraying one's friends.
I know the wives were equally guilty. He seduced but never ever forced to anyone's knowledge.
He often committed these acts of adultery when he was welcomed as a guest at someone's home.
Having adventures on the bed with the wives of the people who invited you in their homes- pretty low to me.
The women were adult and consenting, but it is still betraying the trust of people.
If all these were to happen with the consent of the husbands, although it would be extremely weird and unnatural, not to mention- immoral, by the standard of the stark majority of any society, I wouldn't have given it any thought at all.
I recently bumped into this Arte documentary about his life. I believe in the first 5 minutes they list his achievements and what he was like as a kid.
I don't think you would have been disappointed :-)
Thanks. The video description states that "If, one day, an artificial consciousness supplants human intelligence, it will be largely due to him." (Si, un jour, une conscience artificielle supplante l’intelligence humaine, ce sera en grande partie de son fait.).
In fact, his last work is an unfinished book "The Computer and the Brain". Now is the best time for us to continue this work.
He probably would - he was incredibly warlike and had quite little regard for human life. Just like anyone else he had violently wrong opinions and predictions and had his biases - he was certainly a fallible mind though a genius.
That being said, there are quite a few historical figures (Einstein, Penrose, Hawking, Ramanujan, Bertrand Russel, Grothendieck) that are nowhere as morally questionable as many, though they are all flawed people.
On a purely intellectual level I doubt that you would be disappointed though they are all human in the end.
Early in the Cold War -- while the US had a nuclear monopoly -- Von Neumann was a strong proponent of an all-out, surprise first strike against the USSR by the US. "With the Russians it is not a question of whether but of when. If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?"
