Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun FROM THE PUBLISHER
On March 13, 1964, Feynman delivered a lecture to the Caltech freshman class, "The Motion of Planets Around the Sun"why the planets move elliptically instead of in perfect circles. For reasons unknown, most probably for his own amusement, he chose to make the argument using mathematics no more advanced than high-school plane geometry. Isaac Newton had pulled off much the same trick nearly 300 years earlier in his masterpiece, the Principia. Feynman, unable to follow Newton's obscure proof, invented his own original, geometrical proof in the Caltech lecture. The subject of Feynman's lecture was the watershed discovery that separated the ancient world discovery that separated the ancient world from the modern world - the culmination of the Scientific Revolution. Before Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, the universe was Earth-centered. After their discoveries, our idea of the universe steadily altered and expanded, moving outward to the infinity we try to understand in our own time. Thus Feynman deals here with a crowning achievement of the human mind, comparable to Beethoven's symphonies. Shakespeare's plays, or Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Feynman conclusively demonstrates the astonishing fact that has mystified and intrigued all deep thinkers since Newton's time: Nature obeys mathematics. For thirty years this brilliant and seminal lecture lay dormant in the Caltech archives. Now, in this book, Feynman's lost lecture has been reconstructed and explained in meticulous detail together with a history of ideas of the planets' motions. Anyone who remembers high-school geometry can enjoy it and can profit from the compact disc that accompanies this book.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Isaac Newton, in his Principia Mathematica (1687), proved Johannes Kepler's law explaining why planets travel in elliptical orbits around the Sun. In 1964, theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, the bestselling author and Nobel Prize winner, set forth his own proof of Kepler's law, using only plane geometry. Feynman's difficult proof, presented in an introductory lecture to Caltech undergraduates, never made it into the classic multivolume Feynman Lectures on Physics, published between 1963 and 1965, but California Institute of Technology archivist Judith Goodstein unearthed the transcript of Feynman's 1964 lecture, published here along with explanatory commentary and historical background, plus 25 photographs and 150 diagrams. Caltech physics professor David Goodstein, Feynman's friend and colleague until the latter's death in 1988, provides a warm reminiscence and does a good job of explaining how quantum physics and relativity supplanted Newtonian science. (May)
Library Journal
Not only colleagues but friends of noted physicist Richard Feynman, David and Judith Goodstein, a professor of physics and a registrar/archivist, respectively, are well qualified to present this material. Their book consists of four chapters. The first and largest is a brief history of the establishment of the Copernican cosmology, which Feynman gave as a lecture to the freshman class at Caltech. Feynman then revisits the work of Isaac Newton and the watershed proof of the Scientific Revolution that separated the ancient world from the modern. There is also chapter a with some wonderful reminiscences of Feynman. While Feynman's presentation requires only an understanding of high school geometry, some persistence will be required to grasp what he is saying. Recommended for academic and public libraries emphasizing the history of science. (CD-ROM not seen.) [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/96.]-James Olson, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago
BookList - Gilbert Taylor
Recorded in 1964, this lecture exhibits two unusual aspects: a superstar faculty member teaching "freshmen" a treat unheard of in today's academy--and a proof using only geometry, not calculus as is usual, that planets orbit in ellipses. The lecturer, of course, is the playful genius Richard Feynman--safecracker, atom bomb maker, bongo drummer, and beloved teacher. In tribute to his qualities, former Feynman student Goodstein and his archivist spouse have restored Feynman's voice on a CD accompanying this book. Goodstein expands, in a version replete with numerous diagrams, his spare notes; in a subsequent section, he transcribes Feynman's words verbatim. The effect is a demonstration of what makes an effective science teacher, and lapsed mathematicians who memorized the formulas for triangles and circles can start following Feynman's argument, which he couched in geometry because those were Kepler's and Newton's tools when they revolutionized physics. As for acquisition criteria, general libraries that circulate the Feynman biography "Genius" (1992) by James Gleick can chance it with this curio.
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