“Here's the deal,” begins an Amazon.com reader’s online review of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, as quoted in the opening of a 5 December Nature editorial. “If ya wanna do this whole physics thing vanilla-style, go buy and read a nice physics textbook. If you want to taste physics—really take it in, like a delicious chocolate mousse or a symphony orchestra or Shakespeare done by British folk—this is where you have to be.”
Accompanying the editorial, a commentary by Rob Phillips, a professor of biophysics and biology at Caltech, contains this summarizing passage:
The book was based on a course the Nobel-prizewinning theoretical physicist and polymath Richard Feynman taught from 1961 to 1963, in an attempt to reinvigorate "freshman physics" at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. In 1964, the course was published as the three-volume The Feynman Lectures on Physics, by Feynman and fellow physicists Matthew Sands and Robert Leighton. With his lectures, Feynman joined a long tradition of famed physicists—such as Max Planck, Arnold Sommerfeld, Wolfgang Pauli and Lev Landau—providing personal grand vistas. Unlike those, Feynman's vista is "elementary" and joyous—a joy deeply magnified in the audio version.
What makes these lectures timeless? Elementary physics has been taught to undergraduates for nearly a century with relatively little change. Over the past 50 years the subject has been even more static. Textbooks and introductory courses have largely targeted those planning to study medicine and engineers with a focus on formulaic problem-solving and exam preparation, rather than cultivating a wonder for nature and the development of physical intuition.
Phillips describes Feynman’s work as being “about simplicity, beauty, unity and analogy, presented with enthusiasm and insight that bursts from the page.” He quotes Feynman calling physics “the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun.”
The editorial takes note of Feynman’s unorthodox approach, observing that originally, an objection arose that he was not the right choice for Caltech’s curriculum-reinvigoration task. The editors add, “At around the same time, incidentally, an official at Decca Records decided that ‘The Beatles have no future in show business.’”
They also note, quoting the Phillips piece, that the three-volume book “has endured because it was ahead of its time, and because [Feynman’s] ‘introduction to elementary physics seems to have higher aspirations—the love of nature and a grasp of it through experimentation and reasoning.’ In Feynman’s hands, physics turned from a description of the world to a way of thinking about it, and a generation was hooked.” They observe that generous funding enabled Caltech’s effort to improve its physics curriculum, and they end by calling for university officials never to forget the importance of support for great teaching.
The editorial cites and links to a seven-page 2005 Physics Today article by Sands, who was a Feynman colleague for many decades and is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sands calls his article a “memoir on how the Lectures on Physics came to be.” At Caltech’s Feynman Lectures website, the book’s first and third volumes are freely available in HTML, with preparation of the second volume in progress. The Feynman Lectures on Physics New Millennium Edition is available from Basic Books.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
