I was fortunate to enter Caltech as an undergraduate in 1962 and thus received the Feynman lectures the year after their originator first presented them. I had Robert Leighton as my freshman-year instructor and Gerry Neugebauer for my sophomore year. On several occasions, Feynman was dissatisfied with his first take on a lecture and would re-present it to our class a year later. We students would not miss a class when we knew Feynman would be lecturing.
Perhaps my most striking memory of a Feynman lecture was not of one I attended, but of one being prepared for the class ahead of me. I was doing my weekly lab work in the freshman physics lab. At one point, as I walked out into the hall to get a drink of water, I heard a familiar voice coming from the lecture room at the other end of the hall. I peeked in to discover Feynman practicing to an empty lecture hall the lecture he was to deliver an hour or so later. It was a full dress rehearsal, with all the gestures, enthusiasm, and chalkboard notations. The excellent choreography Matthew Sands mentions was no accident. What impressed me so deeply was that here was the world’s most famous living physicist taking such care to present this material to lower-division undergraduates. The least we could do as students was to return the favor and try our best to learn what he offered.
