Great interview but i feel that Wolfram's attempts to put him self on the same level as Feynman was pretty cringe worthy. No doubt Stephen Wolfram is a really smart guy, but he comes across as boarder-line delusional in the way he portrays his own mental abilities. The idea that he has been sitting on a stack of Feynman's notes which he has 'yet to have time to look at' is total nonsense. There is almost a zero percent chance that he hasn't looked at them. Rather, he almost certainly would have looked at them (and perhaps still does), but just can't understand what Feynman did. At heart (and at his own admission), Wolfram is a businessman who finds brilliant minds and puts them to use in a very smart way. I think WolframAlpha and his other technical contributions are fantastic and he has done the world a great many services, but I also think its pretty clear he is no genius like Feynman was. Thanks for the podcast Lex!,(reply>), Feynman's IQ was only 125.,(reply>), @Lore Thank you for your kind remark.,(reply>), During those times IQ had to do with linguistic skills. Feynman was never a language person. If it were to be Mathematical IQ, his IQ would be off-charts. Even Fermi and von Neumann praised him.,(reply>), Wrong. Wolfram is a briliant prodigy, whereas Feyman's tested IQ was under 130. In terms of mental capacity, I am convinced Wolfram is superior. In terms of science impact, I think Feyman is almost a god in comparison with Wolfram. However, let's remember that Wolfram is also an antrepreneur, a businessman, he didn't dedicate his entire life to raw science,(reply>), In my take Feynman handed those notes to Stephen because Stephen has a gift for systematization, a process which Feynman began but didn't have the heart to take to fruition himself. Stephen has surely assessed those papers, but to actually "look at" those papers means to figure out whether there's a systematization effort worth completing in the spirit that Feynman once intended. Once Stephen stepped out of academia, he was <i>more</i> than busy enough with his entrepreneurial lifestyle not to get back to this. <br><br>Stephen's own precocity rivaled Feynman's. There was a <i>reason</i> Stephen was personally recruited—at the prodigious age of 18—to enroll as a graduate student at Caltech by Murray Gel-Mann himself. If Stephen was indeed a level below Feynman, it's not by any larger margin that Freeman Dyson was below Srinivasa Ramanujan. Dyson published an extremely successful paper interpreting Ramanujan's work on the partition function (1944), even guessing at a formal foundation (the "crank" of the partition) which was only much later unearthed from Ramanujan's papers in 1976, which had been hiding in plain sight lo those many years. (Do you detect a theme here?) <br><br>I once heard that the last recourse to a failed toy model in physics was to try to get Freeman Dyson interested. If you showed him your conundrum on Friday afternoon, there was a decent chance you'd get a piece of correspondence early the next week—Monday morning in the age of e-mail—explaining your way out of the whole pickle. <br><br>Nowadays this same story circulates about the mathematical prodigy Terence Tao. It's a tradition at Princeton after defending your dissertation to write up your dissertation experience, which Tao did. "Throughout, I didn't have to back up anything with messy calculations: Rudnick always stopped me when I tried." Translation: they were terrified to let Terence get up a good head of steam on an empty blackboard. "After this, they decided to pass me, though they said that my harmonic analysis was far from satisfactory." <br><br>And then what? "In 2006 he received the Fields Medal "for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory, and was also awarded the MacArthur Fellowship." Interesting. So why were the faculty harshing on Terry over his inadequacies in the area of harmonic analysis? Easy. He was awarded his PhD at age 21, where most of his peers were still finishing the final year of their undergraduate degree. He simply didn't have the miles yet to have covered every field to the same depth as another candidate who defends his or her dissertation at age 27. <br><br>Dyson in his own time held the reputation as the terrible Terence Tao of his own little corner of mathematical physics, his own career so accelerated he wasn't even required to obtain a PhD (go directly to the Institute for Advanced Study). And who did Dyson regard as the greatest lightning calculator of his generation? A certain Dick Feynman. <br><br>From <i>Of Historical Note: Richard Feynman</i> (2011) <br><br><i>Feynman and I really understand each other; I know that he is the one person in the world who has nothing to learn from what I have written; and he doesn't mind telling me so. That afternoon, Feynman produced more brilliant ideas per square minute than I have ever seen anywhere before or since. In the evening I mentioned that there were just two problems for which the finiteness of the theory remained to be established; both problems are well-known and feared by physicists. ... When I mentioned this fact, Feynman said, "We'll see about this," and proceeded to sit down and in two hours, before our eyes, obtain finite and sensible answers to both problems. It was the most amazing piece of lightning calculation I have ever witnessed, and the results prove, apart from some unforeseen complication, the consistency of the whole theory. The two problems were the scattering of light by an electric field and the scattering of light by light.</i> <br><br>From <i>Remembering Murray Gell-Mann, Inventor of Quarks</i> — 30 May 2019 <br><br><i>While I was at Caltech, Margaret Gell-Mann got very sick with cancer, and Murray threw himself into trying to find a cure. (He blamed himself for not having made sure Margaret had had more checkups.) It wasn't long before Margaret died. Murray invited me to the memorial service. But somehow I didn't feel I could go; even though by then I was on the faculty at Caltech, I just felt too young and junior. I think Murray was upset I didn't come, and I've felt guilty and embarrassed about it ever since.</i><br><br>So there's Stephen so deferential to his <i>own</i> intellectual idol, that he can't even find it inside himself to pay proper courtesy to the man's deceased spouse. (This being the kind of otherwise commonplace social calculation not included in any PhD awarded under the age of 25). <br><br>It's also interesting that Stephen wrote an obituary for his Caltech colleague Gell-Mann (he has written a few of these) and not for his Caltech colleague Richard Feynman (not that I was able to find). Clearly from the Gell-Mann obituary, Stephen regarded Murray as having a much deeper intuition than Dick (who he believed obtained most of his legendary intuition through the back door of lightening calculation, as he corroborates in this video). <br><br>Guess who wrote the most scathing review of <i>A New Kind of Science</i> of all time. Freeman Dyson. <br><br><i>For now, the skeptics aren't having it. "Worthless!" says renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, who received an early copy of A New Kind of Science and required only a glance before dismissing it. "It's a case of style over substance."</i> (Wired)<br><br>But does that entirely end the matter? Not really. Feynman and Gell-Mann by the end could hardly find a nice thing to say about each other, either. Turns out, there were raging differences of taste in World War Wunderkind. <br><br>Major influences on Stephen before he rushed off to the Left Coast at Gell-Mann's personal invitation: Michael Atiyah and Roger Penrose (George Zweig also comes into the picture at some point). Dyson's influences at Oxford: Hardy, Littlewood, Dirac, and Besicovich. About his course of study during the onset of WWII when much of the university was a ghost-town and the few underaged students who remained enjoyed small and intimate study groups: "Dirac is very slow and easy to follow; Pars and Besicovich a bit quicker; Hardy goes on like an avalanche and it is all I can do to keep up with him." If you think Steven's access to Atiyah was much of a step down from Dyson's access to Hardy, you're smoking something: "Michael Atiyah (OM FRS FRSE FMedSci FAA FREng) was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004." <br><br>Stephen is admittedly a weird cat, and his pet theory is not to everyone's taste by any means, but if you came away from this clip with the supposition he doesn't even belong at the same table with Dick Feynman, you seriously need to adjust your smug-buster.