Billionaires think differently from normal people. But different from normal is not always a good thing. Billionaires are parasites who think their greed benefits the world. And a lot of them also think that they can do theoretical physics without putting in the work that the most famous physicists put in.
Actual theoretical physicist Angela Collier has already done at least one video about this phenomenon of billionaires who think they can just do physics.
One of them is Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder who paid a lot of money to make the Feynman lectures available for free on the Microsoft website. That’s beneficial, right? Plus it had a business upside for Microsoft.
In 2009, when Microsoft Research introduced their Silverlight framework for media-rich web applications, Bill Gates licensed rights to stream the BBC’s films of Feynman’s Messenger Lectures online. Hoping to encourage others to make educational content available for free, he used them in the first Silverlight demo, “Project Tuva.” [footnote removed] The publication of Feynman’s Messenger Lectures for free online viewing, with special features such as searchable synchronized scrolling transcripts, links to related online material, and commentary, was an instant hit with Feynman fans, students and physicists. The Silverlight framework, however, was not widely adopted, and in 2016 Project Tuva was retired. The videos were still available for viewing on the Microsoft Research Website (though without the special features) until 2021, when their BBC license expired. The license has since been generously renewed by Bill Gates so that the videos can continue to be shown online to users of The Feynman Lectures Website.
The Feynman lectures are now housed at the Caltech website, where anyone with a decent Internet connection and a reasonably modern Web browser (not necessarily Microsoft Edge) can watch them.
I’m not in the Bill Gates fan club, but at least in this instance he did a good thing. Now let’s look at former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Apparently, the guy wants to make discoveries in quantum physics, which is a laudable goal.
To achieve that goal, maybe Kalanick hires some of the brightest researchers in quantum physics and builds a state-of-the-art lab with special lasers, dilution refrigerators, vacuum chambers and such.
Nah. Instead, Kalanick spent some time with Elon Musk’s Grok. You know, the one that recently went on a racist tirade and called itself a big fan of Adolf Hitler. But even setting the Hitler stuff aside, there’s plenty here to exasperate real physicists like Angela Collier.