Feynman's lost lecture
"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.
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- On the other hand, simplicity is a hallmark of brilliance.
"Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, 'Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.' Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, 'I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.' But he came back a few days later to say, 'I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it.'"
— Goodstein & Goodstein, Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun (Norton, New York, 1996)
- I think that is probably a "folk quote", the attribution to Feynman is also inaccurate AFAIK. He said something similar though:
> Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”
– Feynman’s Lost Lecture by David and Judith Goodstein
- "Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, 'Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.' Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, 'I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it.' But he came back a few days later to say, 'I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don't really understand it.'"
-- David L. Goodstein, Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun, ISBN:978-0393039184.
- Changing conventions for units and moving toward standardizing across all scientific fields to the SI units (meters, etc.) is useful, but this article isn't about changing units. This idea of a new set of abstractions for representation and exploration of physics is a much much more powerful idea.
When I first learned special relativity, I remember struggling with my intuition and having to rely on unfamiliar formula to find the answer to even simple problems. The farther one goes in physics the more one has to trust the equations (electo-magnetics, special and general relativity, quantum physics, etc.) and the math itself starts to obscure whats happening. Having simpler representations and more powerful abstracts is an exciting possibility. I saw this again when trying to solve some simply stated problems (e.g. a particle falling off of a frictionless sphere), mathematics like Lagrangians which I didn't know when I first attempted this problem make the solution so much easier.
As an analogy for those that aren't really interested in the mathematics, these ideas are a bit like the jump from algebra and infinite series math to integral calculus. Although, in theory, one could solve many problems of physics without calculus (see for example [1]), the use of calculus immediately opens up a better understanding and the ability to describe and solve more realistic problems (like cars that don't travel at a constant speed).
[1] "Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun" by David Goodstein
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