> I can see why Feynman became sexually promiscuous afterwards, undoubtedly to numb the pain of losing his wife; seduction allowed him to have a form of that connection, albeit without the depth and love of what he had with his wife.
He married again in 1952 and divorced in 1958 (and married again a couple of years later).
I don't know if sexual promiscuity was part of the divorce complaint but apparently this fragment was in it: "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night."
After reading lots of biographical material on Feynman it seems like he was a very loving father and husband (especially to his first wife) but obviously devoted to physics. I would imagine it's very difficult to find the balance between his kind of career and family such that the family feels they get sufficient attention.
It’s difficult when you want to live three lives in one human lifetime, and academia is one of those careers where that might happen to you.
> academia is one of those careers where that might happen to you
why? i dont follow. is academia so special there?
I imagine it's because of the lure of pure-research and self-actualization and pursuing an area of study with almost no limitations. No idea if this is true or not, but this is how I idealize academia.
Opposed to "industry" -- where you're under constant pressure to figure out why some random docker container pull fails or mutating web hook won't let your pod be deleted. It's just not fun or meaningful. It's a slog and the needless complexity is doing nothing but increasing.
Yes, I think academics are susceptible to defining themselves by their work, truly being to devoted to their subject and it's open ended so you can spend as much time as you choose on it.
I think these things can all be true in industry though. I say this as an industry researcher myself that has struggled with work/life balance my whole career. In the more soul destroying industry jobs hopefully you can at least clock out at 5pm and pay attention to other interests, i.e. you don't have to care about work outside of work hours.
I actually think it's more to do with the person than the job though. It's about how much you value work/career achievements and recognition vs family vs hobbies. Caveat: some people genuinely have to work unreasonable amounts of hours to put food on the table for their family and that's unfortunate.
More inclined to always be working because there’s more of a love of what you do… they certainly aren’t doing it for the money lol.
Iirc at the time there was still "at fault divorce", and the divorce settlement was influenced by who was at fault. So a (likely overly charitable reading) of the entire thing is that Feynman agreed to be portrayed in a bad light to achieve a fairer Deal for his soon to be ex wife.
Maybe it was required to get a divorce at all but otherwise it seems that he could have settled on something “fair” without needing to force himself into it.