TITLE: Too Bad Richard Feynman Didn't Have a Blog
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 07, 2018  3:04 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:

 There is a chapter in <EM>"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"</EM>
 about Feynman's work with biologists over summers and sabbaticals
 at Princeton and Cal Tech.  He used a sabbatical year to work in a
 colleague's lab on bacteriophages, ribosomes, and RNA.  After
 describing how he had ruined a potentially "fantastic and vital
 discovery" through sloppiness, he writes:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 The other work on the phage I never wrote up -- Edgar kept asking
 me to write it up, but I never got around to it.  That's the
 trouble with not being in your own field:  You don't take it
 seriously.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 I did write something informally on it.  I sent it to Edgar, who
 laughed when he read it.  It wasn't in the standard form that
 biologists use -- first, procedures, and so forth.  I spent a lot
 of time explaining things that all the biologists knew.  Edgar
 made a shortened version, but I couldn't understand it.  I don't
 think they ever published it.  I never published it directly.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

 Too bad Feynman didn't have a blog.  I'll bet I could have learned
 something from his write-up.  Not being a biologist, I generally
 can use some explanation intended for a lay reader, and Feynman's
 relaxed style might pull me through a biology paper.  (Of all the
 sciences, biology is usually the biggest chore for me to learn.)

 These days, scientists can post their informal writings on their
 blogs with little or no fuss.  Standard form and formal style are
 for journals and conferences.  Blog readers prefer relaxed writing
 and, for the most part, whatever form works best for the writer in
 order to get the ideas out to the world.

 Imagine what a trove of stories Feynman could have told on his
 blog!  He did tell them, of course, but in books like <EM>"Surely
 You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"</EM>.  But not everyone is going to
 write books, or have books written for them, so I'm glad to have
 the blogs of scientists, economists, and writers from many
 disciplines in my newsreader.  For those who want something more
 formal before, or instead of, taking on the journal grind, we have
<A HREF="https://arxiv.org">
    arXiv.org</A>.
 What a time to be alive.

 Of course, when you read on in the chapter, you learn that James
 Watson (of Watson &amp; Crick fame) heard about Feynman's work,
 thought it was interesting, invited Feynman to give a seminar talk
 at Harvard, and then went into the lab with him to conduct an
 experiment that very same week.  I guess it all worked out for
 Feynman in the end.
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