Richard Feynman playing bongos

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that." Upon reading this paragraph, I was reminded of his book "What do you care what other people think", which was a homage to Arlene, partly because Feynman made the fatal mistake of trusting the doctor's judgement to disregard the blatantly obvious diagnosis. He wrote about his experience in much more detail here: Part 1: link Part 2: link --------------------------------------------------------- //Comments below are irrelevant to the thread, I just felt like sharing. Feynman was depressed for a while but eventually his love for physics helped him recover. Hans Bethe once said, "Feynman depressed is just a little more cheerful then any other person when he is exuberant." Feynman is arguably the most logical and happiest human being that has ever existed. Feynman's magnificent exuberance and puzzle solving enthusiasm remained up until his last days, where his coworker Christopher Sykes remarked "Look at this man. He faces the abyss. He doesn't know whether he is going to live through this week. But he was consumed by it, and he worked on it all day long...." link A few days before his second operation, Feynman sang a bongos song about orange juice, an amusing take of Linus Pauling's advice to possibly cure his cancer. Just look at his smile at the end of this video: ▶ this video I would also like to add that on Feynman's last days at the ho

Good read, but there's so much more to the story. His book "What do you care what other people think" is a homage to Arlene, partly because Feynman made the fatal mistake of trusting the doctor's judgement to disregard the blatantly obvious diagnosis. He wrote about his experience in much more detail here: Part 1: link Part 2: link He was depressed for a while but eventually his love for physics helped him recover. Feynman is the most logical and happiest human I have ever seen. Hans Bethe once said, "Feynman depressed is just a little more cheerful then any other person when he is exuberant." Feynman's magnificent exuberance and puzzle solving enthusiasm remained up until his last days, where his coworker Christopher Sykes remarked "Look at this man. He faces the abyss. He doesn't know whether he is going to live through this week. But he was consumed by it, and he worked on it all day long...." link A few days before his second operation, Feynman sang a bongos song about orange juice, an amusing take of Linus Pauling's advice to possibly cure his cancer. Just look at his smile at the end of this video: ▶ this video I would also like to add that on Feynman's last days at the hospital, his last words to his artist friend Jirayr was "Don't worry about anything, go out and have a good time!" link Anyone who thinks of Feynman as a cold-hearted scientist is incredibly mistaken.

> (Though I'm sure someone will quickly provide evidence of a string theorist who's also quite handy with the cello). Does bongo count? ▶ this video

Thank you for your interesting comment and the links. I still wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more. It seems to me that we speak about different things. I am glad you brought up the Bob Dylan's music as an example. I agree that for him the music was an effective tool to pass his emotions and experiences to a listener. However his main tool is his lyrics and we cannot separate it from his music. A good argument for that is that Bob Dylan isn't popular or well-known in the non-english speaking countries. I would say it is because his music isn't expressive without the lyrics. He wasn't a musician in the sense Beethoven was, he was rather a modernized poet. This is the difference between Bob Dylan and "classical music" we discuss in this thread. My point is about where we need to place Beethoven music as an intellectual activity. I say it is different from written art, science or discussion. These are methods for creative people to transfer their experience and understanding to other people. Music (pure music) doesn't involve it literary, only indirectly. It involves finding sound patterns that are known to bring pleasure to a listener. Nobel but different. There is no question that music brings pleasure to people's and specifically yours and mine life and it is an important part of the culture and I am certainly not arguing that people should stop listening to music. Music definitely tells us a lot about the cultural evolution with time just as you argue. But cuisine