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The Feynman Lectures: Physics 2: Part 2B, Chapters 20-41: Electromagnetism and Matter
FEYNMAN, Richard P., LEIGHTON, Robert B. (ed.) & SANDS, Matthew (ed.)
Verlag: The California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, 1963
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In den WarenkorbFirst edition. FEYNMAN'S LECTURES ON PHYSICS- EXTREMELY RARE PRE-PUBLICATION ISSUE. Extremely rare pre-publication issue of a section of Feynman's legendary lectures on physics, namely that devoted to electromagnetism, from Maxwell's equations to the optical and magnetic properties of materials, and concluding with four lectures… on elasticity and fluid flow. According to the curators of Caltech's Feynman Lectures website (), this preliminary edition was produced by Caltech's graphics department between the end of the 1962-1963 academic year and the beginning of the 1963-64 academic year. It is copyrighted 1963, one year before the first published edition of the Feynman lectures, produced by Addison-Wesley. No more than 300 copies of this pre-publication edition were printed. This section of the Feynman Lectures is a record of part of the second year's lectures, which were given to the sophomore class during the 1962-1963 academic year (all Caltech sophomores were required to take the class, regardless of their majors). The printed lectures were not a verbatim transcript of what Feynman said, but were edited by Leighton and Sands. "We hoped to make the written version as clear an exposition as possible of the ideas on which the original lectures were based. For some of the lectures this could be done by making only minor adjustments of the wording in the original transcript. For others of the lectures a major reworking and rearrangement of the material was required. Sometimes we felt we should add some new material to improve the clarity or balance of the presentation. Throughout the process we benefitted from the continual help and advice of Professor Feynman" (Sands). "Feynman's lectures are as powerful today as when first published, thanks to Feynman's unique physics insights and pedagogy. They have been studied worldwide by novices and mature physicists alike; they have been translated into at least a dozen languages with more than 1.5 millions copies printed in the English language alone. Perhaps no other set of physics books has had such wide impact, for so long" (Kip Thorne). "Mark Kac, the eminent Polish-American mathematician, wrote: 'In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with magicians . the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible . Richard Feynman [was] a magician of the highest caliber'" (Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society of London 48 (2002), p. 99). Widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in theoretical physics in the post-World War II era, Feynman shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 1965 with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger "for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles." We are not aware of any other copy of this preliminary version of Feynman's lectures having appeared on the market, and we have located no institutional holdings other than Caltech. Matthew Sands joined the physics department at Caltech in 1950, at the same time as did Richard Feynman. They had known each other at Los Alamos and at Cornell, but at Caltech their acquaintance matured. In the 1950s, Sands served on the Commission on College Physics, which had been established to work on the improvement of physics teaching. "Until that time he had been teaching graduate courses and, with Feynman's help, had restructured the graduate curriculum at Caltech. Stimulated by his work on the Commission on College Physics, he took a close look at the undergraduate physics curriculum at Caltech and didn't like what he saw . in the first two years, when students took chemistry, physics, and engineering, no mention was made of atomic physics, quantum theory, and relativity . [Sands] felt very strongly that they should revise the undergraduate introductory courses in physics. At first, he got only a negative response from Robert Bacher, who was then head of the division of physics, mathematics, and astronomy [but Sands] ultimately convinced Bacher that it would be good to modernize the program . [Bacher] thought that Matt Sands himself was too radical, so he asked Robert Leighton, a quiet conservative, and Victor Neher - an old collaborator of Millikan's and an excellent designer of pedagogical experiments - all three to work on revising the introductory physics curriculum . 'About half way through the year [1960] I [Sands] became very frustrated because Leighton kept coming back with a very traditional outline, and we could not seem to converge on a solution which would meet my requirements and his. One day I had the brilliant inspiration of saying, "Look, why don't we get Feynman to give the lectures and let him make the final decision on the contents?"' "So Sand went to see Feynman at his house and said, 'Look, Richard, you have spent forty years trying to understand physics. Now here is your chance to distil it down to the essence at the level of a freshman.' Feynman thought about it and said, 'Hmm! That might be interesting! But, you know, I have never taught freshman physics before.' Sands had seen Feynman lecture in graduate courses and seminars and was convinced that his style and thought would be very good for what he had in mind. From their discussion, Feynman obtained a good feeling for what might be possible, 'So he said he would think about it for a day or two and I saw him later on and he asked: "Do you know if there has ever been a great physicist who lectured on freshman physics?" I said, "I don't know, but I don't think so!" And he said, "I'll do it!" (Mehra, pp. 483-484). Bacher initially opposed the idea, par.
