Fifty years late for Feynman’s lectures

Richard Feynman at CalTech in 1959; by Joe Munroe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

By LUCY DALLAS 

“You get the impression that he could read nature like a book and simply report on what he found, without the tedium of complex analysis”: so says Paul Davies, in his introduction to Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces, extracted from the legendary Feynman Lectures on Physics. 

Feynman died on February 15, 1988; it is a little morbid to remember him only on this date – perhaps I'll post again on his birthday, May 18. By then I should have finished Six Easy Pieces, a series of lectures he gave fifty-odd years ago at CalTech to first year students (freshmen, a delightful word – are they not so fresh by the time they leave?). I am ashamed to admit I have not read it before, and it is taking a while – not because it is boring or badly expressed, quite the opposite, but it does take a bit of concentration.

Feynman was, of course, the great communicator, and you can see snippets of him in action online (here, for example); relaxed, conversational and engaging, throwing out cracks and hypotheses in his Noo Yawk drawl. He found giving the lectures useful as he believed that in order to understand something properly, you have to be able to explain it simply, and he was happy to start from first principles. There is no mystification, no jargon; he talks about atoms “jiggling” around, explains why elements are named the way they are, tells you that a drop of water is round because all the guys on the outside are trying to get to the middle. Simple, but not simplistic; he moves quickly inwards to questions of quantum behaviour, outwards to universal gravitation, expects you to keep up, and stops whenever he wants to point out something interesting.

And if the humble non-scientist concentrates, it is wondrous stuff; I thought I understood a little about some of the more resonant or crazy-sounding ideas – the uncertainty principle, waves and particles (our band, Spirit of Play, have a song of that name which made it onto the Nature podcast, a high point for me)  – but Feynman talks you through the basic principles, clearly and with no fuss. The ideas are beguiling, and the language is, too; who knew particles have a number assigned to them which quantifies their “strangeness”? Well, lots of people, but you take my point.

The freshmen were, in fact, not necessarily the people who benefited the most from his lecture series; quite a few dropped out, but they were replaced by postgraduates and Feynman’s peers and colleagues, who were gripped by the way he approached the biggest and smallest questions in science and reformulated the teaching – and understanding – of physics.

The best kind of guide, then; fully engaged in explaining why his subject, which he knows from the inside out, is so important, so beautiful and so fascinating.  The day he died, some of his students at CalTech climbed up the library building and hung out a banner that said “We love you, Dick”.