Generative AI and Pseudographic Feynmans

The ability to train generative AI to impersonate humans is an example of something that can be done now because of new technology but which perhaps should never be done. 

I watched part of a video that is allegedly a lecture by Richard Feynman on why it will be impossible for explorers to Mars to return to Earth. In fact, there are many of these fake Feynman lectures on YouTube. They apparently do identify in the first seconds that they are an AI generated voice or graphic. They also match Feynman’s spoken delivery style, his turns of phrase and lecture pacing. I now appreciate the problem in textual forensics that confronted medieval scholars when they sorted out Pseudo-Aristotle and Pseudo-Dionysius.

By Greg Alleman from LinkedIn to YouTube.
Alleman has a career as an aerospace engineer.

These fake videos are intentional falsehoods which by their nature will replicate themselves particularly and others in general by creating an ecosystem that supports those lifeforms. Based on what I know about the evolution of life on Earth, I can only say that while some generative AI may be beneficial and others neutral, the impersonation of real humans is toxic. Videos from writers using generative AI will thrive creating and nourishing populations of pseudographia. It is inevitable that students who want to learn from The Feynman Lectures on Physics will land on one of these pseudo-Feynman lectures.

Two More Fake Feynmans

Yet Another Pair of Fake Feynmans

It is also true that each of us is responsible for determining the truth or falsehood of any assertion, even of our own assumptions. I never saw a P. F. Chang’s until I moved to Austin in 2011. I thought that it was local. I first saw a parody of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks as a hip or campy wall poster back in the late 1960s before I learned the original in an art history class at Case-Western Reserve University in the summer of 1969. The first YouTube video I saw was Weird Al Yankovic’s “White and Nerdy” in 2005. A classmate in a criminal justice class at Washtenaw Community College showed it to me and I really identified with it. The kids in the class explained the other half of it. 

One Archive of Genuine Old Feynman Videos

I enjoy surfing YouTube videos because I like to admire the creative works of others and I learn a lot from them. Looking for printing and typography, I found Elle Cordova’s “Fonts Hanging Out” and “Punctuation Marks Hanging Out.” I also watch Mathologer and Numberphile and I have been going to sleep with David Miller’s series, Quantum Mechanics for Scientists and Engineers in my earphones. (I am testing hypnopedia. I will post here when I can speak the vocabulary.) I also subscribe to Rob Words, Audiomachine, Microbe Hunter, Jordan B. Peterson, and to Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Sarah Paine, among a dozen others.  

A friend who got tired of the AI-created misrepresentations of historical fact warned me about YouTube. Now I understand.

Granted the warning, these simulacrae could prove valuable. Perhaps we cannot have too many copies or reconstructions. Civilization is fragile and literacy is even more delicate. 

Aristotle’s own library was regarded as a royal treasure by the Macedonian ruling family. When they fell out amongst themselves, the scrolls were buried to keep them from competing claimants to the throne. When they were recovered, they were found to have been eaten through. Later scholars reconstructed them, but not well. Fortunately, those were not the only copies; Christian monasteries had preserved others. The Renaissance began when Petrarch and Dante visited those scriptoria to recover the lost writings of antiquity. However, they started with Latin, which they could read. Greek texts did not reblossom until the Renaissance took root in Venice, where Greek was known. Since then, scholars have improved the correctness of our reconstructions. In addition, other works have been unearthed. Aristotle’s lecture “On the Athenian Constitution” was rediscovered among the Oxyrhyncus Papyri. Similarly, in our time The Archimedes Palimpsest was recovered and lately one more page was found astray. But all of that only provides more evidence about what we know to be a huge body of lost works. “Oxyrhynchus yielded a huge random mass of everyday papers — private letters and shopping lists, tax returns and government circulars ... maybe 50,000 in all.” — https://oxyrhynchus.web.ox.ac.uk/waste-paper-city The Archimedes Palimpsest is another recovery with story of several losses and rescues**. 

(https://archimedespalimpsest.org/). So, these AI simulations could prove valuable.

The reason that I listen to Prof. David A. B. Miller’s lectures on quantum mechanics is that I found the textbook in the stacks at the Kuehn Math, Physics, and Astronomy Library when I was working at the University of Texas. It was perfect for me, a good midrange guide for college sophomores with clear narratives that are integrated with the relevant and necessary mathematics and instructive problems. I looked for a video and found the series. 

Image from Amazon. The book is no longer available
from Cambridge Press. Miller has a new volume out,
Modern Physics for Engineers and Scientists 
https://purl.stanford.edu/hr256mp8317

On that basis, imagine that some catastrophe has erased much of our collective electronic memory. Disastrous as the losses would be, they could not be complete. A later generation could scan the books and other printed media and also use AI to rebuild  the videos from fragments. The future could enjoy reconstructions of significant portions of our achievements while inevitably deploring the losses which they know only from inferences. 

** On 6 March 2026, the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik reported the discovery of a lost page of the manuscript, now held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Blois. The text corresponds to page 123 of the Palimpset's version of the On The Sphere and Cylinder, Book 1, Proposition 39-41. The reverse depicts a painting of Daniel surrounded by two lions.— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

About Richard P. Feynman

Genius by James Gleick 

Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow 

Observable Genius 

Merry Newtonmas 2019 

About Generative Artificial Intelligence

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights

ArmadilloCon versus Artificial Intelligence

Invisible Cheating and Visible Rights

Digital Literacy and Artificial Intelligence

Rescuing Aristotle and the Church

Last night, we started watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on DVD. Still waiting to finish Episode 1, the narrative has problems. The error in beatifying Giordano Bruno as a martyr to science was quickly pointed out by others. (See “Did Cosmos Pick the Wrong Hero?” by Corey S. Powell, Discover magazine online here and “Why Did Cosmos Focus on Giordano Bruno?” by Josh Rosenau at the National Center for Science Education here.) Part of that false narrative included a swipe at Aristotle which no one else caught. Aristotle always takes a lot of criticism, mostly by misunderstanding and misattribution. 

Reviewing Episode 6: Deeper and Deeper Still, (which is still in my future), Jennifer Ouellette of the LA Times wrote:

“Anyway, the notion of atoms dates back to an ancient Greek philosopher named Democritus, who first proposed that it just wasn’t possible to keep dividing matter into smaller and smaller bits; at some point, you would reach the smallest possible piece, which he dubbed “atomos” (“not to be cut”). His contemporaries, including Aristotle, didn’t take Democritus seriously, and why should they? They didn’t have the tools to probe such a small scale. But eventually modern physics proved him right.” ("Cosmos’ recap: Deeper and deeper still" April 14, 2014 5:20 AM here.)

First, the physical reality of atoms was doubted by serious scientists such as Ernst Mach as late as 1900. The concept was considered a convenient construct. The reality of very small particles was easy to accept because lenses and microscopes revealed them. However, the concept of “atom” raised unsolvable problems. Of course, those metaphysical objections go back to the Greeks. The problem was argued without resolution. 

What is between atoms? Nothing? “Nothing” is not a different kind of “something” but rather “nothing” truly “does not exist.” What then is between atoms? 

If nothing is between atoms, then why does it take any time at all for atoms go from one place to another? How do atoms interact across the void to form molecules? 

Nature abhors a vacuum. Every space must be filled with something.  If the void of nothing does not exist, and if all matter consists of uncuttable objects, how do we move at all?  

The clepsydra
from Cosmos (1980, page 179)

Obviously, we do move. Just as obviously, all matter is made of something, or perhaps four or five different kinds of something. The lack of a solution to such problems did not prevent social and material progress. And the atomic theory was supported by some evidence. Empedocles of Acragas used it to explain how the “clepsydra” worked. Ultimately, in the modern 19^th century, John Dalton, Dmitri Mendeleev, and others put the idea of the atom to good use.

That being so, the discovery of the electron and eventually other subatomic existents defeated the idea of an ultimately “uncuttable” object. Now, we have fields and statistical probabilities. 

 

Detail of Raphael's School at Athens. 

Plato points to the sky, while

Aristotle reaches for the world.

http://www.museivaticani.va/

Aristotle placed the Earth at the center of the universe for both logical and empirical reasons. A century later, Aristarchus of Samos put the sun at the center of our system. Archimedes attempted to settle question by measuring the parallax. He could not do it. He concluded that either the Earth is the center of the universe, or else the universe is far larger than anyone could imagine. We know now that the problem was his instrumentation. Fine as it was for the times, it was not up to the task. Friedrich Bessel achieved the first measurement of stellar parallax in 1838 using a spectroscope. Similarly, the rotation of the Earth on its axis was not proved by experiment until 1789 by Giovanni Battista Guglielmini and most dramatically demonstrated in 1851 by Léon Foucault. 

Aristotle’s embryology of the chick is one of the greatest experimental observations. He also knew that dolphins are mammals, breathing air, bearing their young alive and feeding them milk. 

In addition to being a careful observer, Aristotle attacked the philosophical (“scientific”) problems of his time by comparing and contrasting what others wrote before and then analyzing those against reason and fact. Even so, most of what we have from Aristotle was reconstructed. The great corpus of his original work was lost when the Macedonian royal family fought over his library and the scrolls were buried. Worms got to them. The damaged manuscripts were reconstructed with egregious errors. Other works from Aristotle’s students (primarily Theophrastus) were copied as if from Aristotle himself. 

The Catholic Church of the early Middle Ages found Platonism to its liking. In the 13^th century, Thomas Aquinas argued well for Aristotle. By the 16^th century—ten generations later—Aristotle was not just the norm, but literal truth. It was the method of men who sought literal truth in one book. We see this today when fundamentalist Christians attack Darwin. Darwin's Origin opens with citations to others before himself who proposed theories of evolution. But fundamentalists take one book as their source and therefore another single book as their target. 

The Catholic church of the Middle Ages was very supportive of astronomy in particular and science in general. Despite our modern focus on Christmas, for Christians the most important day of the calendar is Easter: the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the first day of spring. Calculating Easter required bringing the solar and lunar calendars into agreement. They called the practice computas. It was a mathematical prediction tested by observation—thanks to the astrolabe imported from Islamic Spain in the late 11^th century. The churchmen of the Counter-Reformation would have been out of step with Catholic education of the 12^th century.

As Dr. Tyson says: “To make this journey, we’ll need imagination. But imagination alone is not enough because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than we can imagine. This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence where it leads and question everything.”

It is a nice statement of the scientific method that works for television as it streams past you. Myself, to encapsulate the scientific method, I would have bulleted these points:

• Ask questions.
• Explain observations with logically consistent theories.
• Test theories with different observations and new predictions.
• Publicize your findings and your methods.

The rules can be variously stated. Those four mandates could be expanded to 14 steps. That is how truth works. It is why over 300 proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem have been published. 

As easy as it would be to excoriate Neil deGrasse Tyson, the series was written by Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter, both of whom worked on the original Cosmos: A Personal Journey with Carl Sagan. Druyan was married to Sagan. Sagan was one of Soter’s dissertation advisors. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Joy Hakim’s “Aristotle Leads the Way”

Science in the Middle Ages

The Scientific Method

Great Scientific Experiments 

Of Watches, Beaches, and Atheists 

Plato and Aristotle; Gates and Jobs

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Previously on Necessary Facts
Joy Hakim's "Aristotle Leads the Way" 
Science versus Common Sense 
The Science of Liberty 
That goddam Ayn Rand Book 

Joy Hakim's "Aristotle Leads the Way"

Intended for children, The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way by Joy Hakim has many small problems throughout but remains valuable for its sense of life. The author encourages understanding, exploration, discovery, and the integration of knowledge. You can find it remaindered online at prices low enough to gift an entire class of 5^th graders, if you choose. Though intended for youngsters, nothing is dumbed down. So the book is enjoyable at an adult level.

The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way 
by Joy Hakim, Smithsonian Books, 2004.

 The consistent problem is the lack of nuance and insight. Joy Hakim just repeats common claims about the ancient Greeks and science in the Middle Ages. She mentions Hypatia of Alexandria, but says nothing about her being the likely last and best editor of Ptolemy’s work. She never acknowledges Aspasia of Miletus. And like almost everyone else, she accepts and asserts that the ancient philosophers did not think it necessary to test theories but attempted all knowledge through pure logic.

Despite those problems and their consequences in presentations from cover to cover, the rich array of integrated facts should deliver years of engagement and encouragement to a young learner. Hakim does more than note the milestones; she reminds the reader of the road just traveled; and she looks to the next horizon.

Detail of Raphael's School at Athens.
Plato points to the sky,
Aristotle reaches for the world.
http://www.museivaticani.va/

Through lavish illustrations, and insightful narratives, she presents the mathematics needed at a level that can be grasped with arithmetic and geometry. Among the very many are the Pythagorean theorem (of course), how Aristarchus estimated the distance to the Moon, Democritus’s formula for the volume of a cone, the true nature of the cone as explained by Apollonius of Perga, and the work done by the lever of Archimedes. Occasional timelines remind us that knowledge is passed across generations to those who cared to learn or rediscover.

Writing about Thomas Aquinas, “An ‘Ox’ Who Bellowed” (Chapter 20), Hakim says:

“In the thirteenth century, Paris is the place to be, if you like tumult and activity. While most of Europe is still feudal, Paris is the center of an emerging market economy. Old ideas are being blown away. … Change is both energizing and upsetting. The feudal world was known. What a free, capitalist world might be like is unknown. It seems to offer little security or control. But there is no stopping the new forces. … In the monasteries, clerics are focused on saving their souls through prayer study and isolation. When it comes to science, they quote Pythagoras, Plato, and Augustine. That trio all concentrated, in one way or another, on ideal forms in nature, which often kept them from considering the real world. But at the budding universities, new scholars, inspired by the rediscovery of Greek science, are interested in understanding the forces of nature. Those new scholars are fascinated by Aristotle. Aristotle looked at the world about him and observed, made notes, and classified its inhabitants—plant and animal.” (page 229-230)

—NSTA Recommends

https://www.smithsonianbooks.com/store/science-nature/story-science-aristotle-leads-way/

Teacher’s Guide

http://web.jhu.edu/CSOS/tdmg/Store/Aristotle%20sampler.pdf

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Michael Shermer's Moral Arc

George Boole's Laws of Thought

The Girl Who Owned a City

Science versus Common Sense