brian? what type of engineering training does an MIT professor of Mech Eng
have?

G Never hoid of this Feynman character, before this thread....
Shen

He won a Nobel prize.
He was an accomplished bongo player too, and had a taste for women.

But I think you can take it that his bongo-playing talent and Nobel
class research endeavours are pretty well independent from
boat-handling skills. No Nobellist has ever won a major boat race, as
far as I know.

He could make pretty elementary errors too.
Like calculating the work needed to raise a metric tonne 0.1 meters
with a screw jack for instance. He didn't understand that it takes at
least 2000 joules. But then, he wasn't an engineer! :-)

He thought that if you worked out the potential energy equation m.g.h
m= mass, g = 9.81 m/s^2, h = height in meters,
you found the work done on the screw jack, you see....

Brian W