Hacker CinemaMemories of Feynman
Memories of Feynman
Film · short · 16 min
Directed by Howard Burton
Five of today's most accomplished theoretical physicists describe their formative interactions - both direct and indirect - with the legendary American physicist Richard Feynman.
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2 comments on Hacker News
If it wasn't clear when I say "I'm noticing a pattern" I'm talking about recent history, as in the last twenty years not the last hundred. I'm looking at what we're doing now, your way only tells us if the unfairness of the past 20 years is greater than or less than the 80 years before that.
Instead of IMDB's list of mostly TV movies, how about Wikipedia's Films About Mathematicians[1], look at the biographical films. There are only 8, but the last film biopic of an average white dude was Feynman's back in '96. Last year alone we had major films about Turing and Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind came out in 2001.
Take a look at the most recent big-budget sci-fi. Q: Who had 95% of the screentime in Gravity? A: A woman. Q: Who were the hero scientists in Interstellar? A: A black guy and two women. (How long did Doyle last? What was the race and sex of the disgraced scientist in Interstellar again?)
If you would like to provide a counterpoint, simply name the regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years.
We'll compare that to the efforts towards mythologizing females on HN in the past 30 days. Emmy Noether (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497), The Women Science Forgot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684), and today's Ada Lovelace.
We'll throw in male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3) and compare that to the number of disgraced female scientists (I count 0).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians
Some are pretty good. You'll find that early documentaries tried to convey more information, I guess they figured out dumbing things down made them more entertaining.
Take a look at this Feynman documentary from 1964 for a case in point: http://youtu.be/y3Vc-cL9lTM