I think there is some huge difference between learning some bleeding edge ideas vs stuff that -for years - has been repackaged, processed, and optimized for being taught and for making exams out of it.
The thing is, most of Feynman's work (in particular the stuff he received the Nobel prize for) has not really made it into undergraduate courses, despite being decades older and going through a lot more repackaging and processing. But the quantum hall effect is so simple by comparison that it is taught in early QM courses. So the key takeaway here is that there were still pretty low hanging fruits in physics two decades after Feynman won the Nobel.
sigmoid10|1 year ago