It's not a critique of his work (although to be honest, he's probably not in the top 10 physicists of the 20th century). Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.
> you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein
Yes, you do--it's just that the mythbuilding builds on different aspects of their personalities.
Mythbuilding around Einstein made him out to be the physics outsider who came in and revolutionized physics--or, in the somewhat less outlandish (but still outlandish) version, the kid who flunked all his physics classes in school and then revolutionized physics. Neither is anywhere near the truth. Einstein was an expert in the physics he ended up overthrowing. The reason he did badly in school was that school was not teaching the actual cutting edge physics that Einstein was interested in--and was finding out about from other sources, pursued on his own. And even then, he didn't flunk out of school; when he published his landmark 1905 papers, he was about to be awarded his doctorate in physics, and it wasn't too long after that that he left the patent office and became a professional academic.
Mythbuilding around Hawking made him out to be the genius who, despite his severe physical disability, could see through all the complexities and find the simple answers to fundamental questions that will lead us to a theory of everything and the end of physics. (This mythmaking, btw, was not infrequently purveyed by Hawking himself.) That story conveniently forgets the fact that none of those simple answers he gave have any experimental confirmation, and aren't likely to get any any time soon. He did propose some groundbreaking ideas, but none of them are about things we actually observe, or have any hope of observing in the foreseeable future. And the biggest breakthrough idea he's associated with, black hole entropy and black hole thermodynamics, arguably wasn't his, it was Bekenstein's; Hawking initially rejected Bekenstein's arguments for black hole entropy.
The myth is not "Einstein did badly in school, but for that reason not this one". "Einstein did badly in school" is a myth, period. Einstein excelled in school.
> Rather, it's a critique of the mythbuilding that seems to surround Feynman--and only Feynman, you don't see this stuff around (say) Hawking or Einstein--that turn him into the only physicist worth emulating.
He's the only one who left behind a model for how to go about emulating him.
Hawking and Einstein left behind their work but nothing I'm aware of teaching others how to do comparable work.
As the video points out, Feynman was telling tall tales to impress a much younger man, Ralph Leighton. Ralph Leighton decided to publish stories that told a specific narrative, that being an asshole was cool, and he omitted more wholesome stories about Feynman being supportive of women.
He developed quantum electrodynamics, the first fully fleshed-out quantum field theory. In the process, the invented the action formulation of quantum field theory, which is absolutely fundamental to the modern understanding of the subject, and he invented the method of solving path integrals perturbatively that everyone has used since (Feynman diagrams).
That easily puts him among the top 10 physicists of the 20th Century.
Beyond his research contributions, he was a highly innovative und unorthodox teacher, and an utterly captivating raconteur. He had a highly unusual combination of skills and personality traits. That's why he's so famous.
Sounds like you went to a pretty unusual school? It definitely wasn't on my reading list during a similar time period. But it seems like your doing a lot of selection bias here. People interested in become Physicists inevitably hear about him and the sample of people active on HN is wildly different from the general public.
Without the 20th century restriction, she rants against the list "Einstein. Newton. Feynman."
She says, "The list should be: Newton, Maxwell, Einstein. The answer is Maxwell, if you're making this list, right? James Clerk Maxwell, his complete theory of electrodynamics, the best, most important thing to come out of the 1800s in physics. It's Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, okay? Like Feynman is great, but he's not up there. But in popular culture he is, because he's famous for being a famous physicist instead of being famous for his physics, which also, don't get me wrong, he did a lot of really good physics. I just think it's kind of weird."
I would agree that Maxwell belongs above Feynman if we're talking about modern physicists and not limiting ourselves to the 20th century.
What really amazes me is that Maxwell got as far as he did with the incredibly clunky notation he was using. Our modern notation, IIRC, is due to Heaviside, and was a huge improvement.
I'd put Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, and Dirac ahead of Feynman. I'm not so sure about the others; not that they weren't world class physicists, but so was Feynman.
If we're limiting to work actually done in the 20th century, yes, I agree Planck might not qualify because of the century boundary. And we also get to split hairs over whether 1900, when Planck published his quantum hypothesis, is in the 20th century or the 19th. :-)
Einstein for sure. For the rest: I'm not sure that they're clearly ahead of Feynman. I'm not sure they're behind, either. To me, they seem to kind of be in a cluster.
Apart from Einstein, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli, Bohr and Fermi are clearly ahead in depth and breadth of contribution. Post-war it's less clear, but IMO Steven Weinberg and Murray Gell Mann are probably greater.
As for your later contention that he's less visible to the general public since the '90s, well, I had Surely You're Joking as required school reading in the '00s, the narrator of the video similarly remarks on it being recommended reading for aspiring physicists in probably near enough the same timeframe. Oh, and someone cared enough to post a link today to his blackboard, and (as of this writing) 58 other people cared to upvote it.