The article by Matthew Sands was thoroughly enjoyable. Educated in both India and the West, and now having been a practicing physicist for the past three decades, I look back at The Feynman Lectures on Physics with romantic feelings. The typical physics texts used in the Indian higher-education system were often borrowed from the British curriculum—not today’s, but probably as followed by Cambridge and Oxford universities many decades past. Problem solving was scarce; in fact, when some of us tried to convince the annual honors examination setters at the university to base 50% of the exams on solving problems, our fellow students and respected professors objected vehemently. Amid such chaos, Feynman’s lectures were cool, and I and a few of my friends enjoyed them immensely and took the science seriously.
My own experience indicates that the Feynman lectures had a greater effect on students in India than on those in the West. When I was a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, I took a topical lecture course from Richard Feynman, who was visiting as part of his sabbatical, and I got a taste of his creative pedagogy in action. He decided to teach us cosmology for a change. Using the virial theorem of classical mechanics and the tabulated velocity field of known stars and galaxies in a bounded volume of our space, he demonstrated that a large amount of mass must be postulated to explain the observed velocity field. I learned about dark matter in that lecture for the first time.
I believe that the editing of the Feynman lectures definitely benefited from Sands’s touch, since I can compare the similar lucidity of the two men. I think Sands is being modest when he states that he was just an editor; I suspect he contributed to the exposition and writing. His Physics of Electron Storage Rings (SLAC report 121, 1970), which I read as a graduate student, was a delicious and delightful treat of extraordinary pedagogy.
Robert Leighton influenced us as well. We would seek out practical American texts that offered, for example, an informal style and lots of problems. One such book that helped me tremendously in understanding modern physics was the Leighton book that Sands mentions. 1 Perhaps in the US his book was considered old-fashioned, but for me it was refreshing and crucial. The Leighton text helped me succeed in taking the Graduate Record Exams while I contemplated graduate school.
