Which is good, because I was not awed by the author's name. I think
very highly of Feynman and might have been swayed to doubt my
judgement rather than my experience. Guess this is why blind peer
review is an awesome thing.
Of course I'm possibly too dumb to appreciate majestic poetry. Or it
worked in 1974 in a way that fails now. Or we read different articles.
It's actually a writing style I use myself - fragmented but with
purposeful "abductive" reasoning. But to pull it off you have to
deliver a cadence.
A bit of bad writing in no way diminishes my opinion of someone I
respect as a scientist and teacher, but humanises him more. I see him
as an very authentic person and it brings me a smile to think of
Richard Feynman penning this and, as we all do, reading it back a few
weeks later and saying "WTF was I thinking?". Smart people are capable
of missing the mark.
It was not written as an article, it's a transcript of a speech (Caltech’s 1974 commencement address, if you read the introduction), that's why it all over the place.
The FermatsLibrary page contains a pdf showing a photocopy of the original piece with some annotations at the side. The pdf is just a graphic and does not have highlightable text but the annotations are proper text.
Perhaps you have some minimal view enabled on your browser and are only seeing the annotations, the only "text" on the page.
Exactly! What's funny is that rather than simply failing hard it
silently kinda half-works, presenting me with a mashed-up, incoherent
mess that sort of reads like it might be a legit article, but written
by crazy person.
A good object lesson in an awful idea for web presentation in my
opinion, but amusing nonetheless.
