I do not know if it is funny or sad: the dark force struck again. As should be obvious from all of my recent posts, I do my utmost to refer very objectively to what’s in Feynman’s Lectures, and what makes sense in them, and what does not. I started this blog more than ten years – before Feynman’s Lectures went online – and one of my brothers (a university professor in Cape Town) also thought my blog is actually an encouragement for readers to buy Feynman’s Lectures. But… Well… No. One is, apparently, not allowed to disagree with Bill Gates’ or MIT’s view of Feynman’s legacy: he was right, and everyone else is wrong. So… A video of mine on that got ‘struck’ and was taken offline.

Hmmm… The experience reminds of my efforts to try to engage with the Wikipedia authors and editors, which yielded no result whatsoever. I am not mainstream, obviously, and any edits I suggest are ruled out in advance. […] I am simplifying a bit, but that was, basically, my experience when trying to help rework the Wikipedia article on the Zitterbewegung interpretation of quantum physics. Funnily enough, I get all these advertisements begging me to donate to Wikipedia: I would actually do that if the process of trying to add or edit would have been somewhat friendlier.

In any case, it made me post my very last video on YouTube. The pdf-file I used to prepare for it, is on ResearchGate, which I warmly recommend as – probably – the only open science forum where you can publish working papers or presentations without any backlash. I can only hope it will stay that way. With all what is going on (I am appalled by the misinformation on the Ukraine war, for example), nothing is sure, it seems…

Post scriptum (2 May 2024): Because I had put a fair amount of work and preparation in it, I edited out Feynman’s Lectures and published it again. I hope it does not make Mr. Gottlieb angry again. 🙂 If it would, then… Well… Then I hope he finds peace of mind some other day.

19 May 2024: To be frank, things like this do shock me. Fortunately, this weekend is party time in Brussels (it is the ‘Pride’ weekend, and the atmosphere is very festive in the center here, where I live). It encouraged me to do some more videos. Different ones. Fun ones: just taking my Wacom tablet and jotting down stuff and talking about it without any preparation and with some nice Belgian beer on the side. Surprisingly, they got hundreds of views. See, for example, this talk about why I do not believe in a strong force or color charges, or this talk on the one-photon Mach-Zehnder experiment which figures so prominently in the MIT-edX course on QM. Also, I do not know if it is coincidence, but I got a surge in recommendations on my Principles of Physics paper on ResearchGate. I wrote that paper as a kind of manifesto. Not as some kind of “here you go: this is the explanation” thing. So I am happy that paper is going well: keep thinking for yourself. 🙂