John Preskill
speaker
321 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 29 May
John Preskill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Because that's the other thing.
He detested any pretense at knowledge.
You know, he hated fakery.
He says it's much more interesting to live not knowing the answers to things than having answers that might be wrong.
The great thing is to be endlessly curious and want to find out.
But if you can't find out, well, live with the doubt.
Ralph Layton got in touch with me and said, look, he's really ill now.
People think he's really not going to last much longer.
By then, there'd also been conversations between Ralph and Feynman and me about this fascination they had with this country called Tanyu Tuva.
It was harmonics.
They wanted to find out absolutely everything they could about this remote country in the middle of Asia.
They even found a phrasebook that they could somehow write to get in touch with people in Tuva, and they did.
Meanwhile, the whole problem was how could they get there?
Typical of Feynman, he was...
offered the opportunity to go there, the Soviet Academy of Sciences said, look, we'll arrange for you to go to Tanyutuva if you'll agree to come and give some lectures in Moscow, physics lectures, which everybody obviously would want to hear.
And Feynman refused to do this for two reasons.
One is he didn't want to, as he called it, cheat by using ways of getting to this place that ordinary people couldn't do.
He didn't want to do it in what he saw as a cheating, privileged way just because he was famous and so on.
And also he felt so strongly about human rights issues in Russia that he declined this idea of doing the lectures.
Anyway, they kept trying to find out a way to go.
Showing 41–60 of 321 · page 3 of 17
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