Feynman, Richard P.

RICHARD FEYNMAN'S LECTURES ON GRAVITATION 1-16, INCLUDING THE ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPTIONS OF LECTURES 12-16 BY MORINIGO AND WAGNER, WITH RICHARD FEYNMAN'S NOTATIONS

During the 1962-63 academic year, Richard Feynman taught two courses that would cement his reputation as one of the most dynamic, engaging, and beloved physics professors of the 20^th century. One of these courses, a sophomore physics course, performed the novel feat of incorporating quantum mechanics into an undergraduate lecture course, and has since been preserved as the second and third volumes of the revered Feynman Lectures on Physics. The other course—no less important if less well known—was aimed at advanced graduate students and postdocs and has since become known as the Feynman Lectures on Gravitation.

Feynman gave 27 lectures in his 1962-63 course on gravitation, all of which were recorded and transcribed by his students Fernando Morinigo and Bill Wagner. Shortly after the course was over, Feynman reviewed and edited the transcriptions for the first 11 lectures, at which point copies of the 11 lectures were printed, bound, and sold as a textbook in the Caltech bookstore. Buoyed by a steady stream of demand from both students and faculty over the preceding decade, a third revision of the lectures was produced in 1971, at which point Lectures 12-16 were included. A disclaimer was added which read:

"...These lectures were intended to accompany the previous eleven in the 1962-63 notes, but were never satisfactorially [sic] edited and corrected for Professor Feynman to feel that they should be included...These lectures retain their rough form: except for minor errors corrected in transcription, they remain the same as they were eight years ago: Professor Feynman has not checked them."

Included here with the unpublished printed third edition of Lectures on Gravitation are five of the original transcriptions of Lectures 12-16 by Fernando Morinigo and Bill Wagner, with extensive notations, revisions, and corrections made in preparation for printing. Importantly, despite the disclaimer that Feynman had not checked the lectures, NOTATIONS IN FEYNMAN'S HAND can be found on the transcribed version of Lecture 12, pp. 5-7, as well as on the printed version of Lecture 14, p. 2 (recto and verso) and p.6, as well as on a laid in sheet (recto and verso).

In discussing the importance of the Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, one of his biographers has said:

"It is difficult...to realize how revolutionary Feynman's approach was...this new picture of gravity and general relativity created a completely novel bridge between general relativity and the rest of physics that was not there before. It suggested, just as Feynman hoped it would, that one might use the tools of quantum field theory not only to understand general relativity but also to unify it with the other forces of nature...Feynman did not find that a consistent quantum theory of gravity interacting with matter...could be derived by simply treating general relativity as he had electrodynamics...Nevertheless, every major development that has taken place in the fifty-odd-years since Feynman began his work in this area, involving a line of scientists from Feynman to Weinberg to Stephen Hawking and beyond, has built on his approach" (Krauss, Quantum Man, pp. 245-9).

This collection provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the extensive labor that went into producing the Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, with Morinigo and Wagner's original typed and autograph transcriptions for lectures 12-16 along with their extensive notations and revisions, as well as Richard Feynman's own notations and additions.

REFERENCES:

Feynman, Richard P., Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vols. 1-3. Basic Books, 2010.

Feynman, Richard P., Fernando B Morinigo, William G. Wagner, and Brian Hatfield, ed. Feynman Lectures on Gravitation. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Krauss, Lawrence. Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science. New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.