Richard Feynman, Ray L. Newburn

A complete set of lecture notes made by prominent NASA scientist Ray L. Newburn (born 1933) when he was a student in Richard Feynman’s advanced mathematical physics course at Caltech, only a few years after Feynman had joined the faculty and long before he was a celebrity.

• Richard Feynman (American).
• Ray L. Newburn (American).
• Manuscript lecture notes for Physics 129, Advanced Mathematical Physics. Pasadena, CA, Caltech, 1954-1955.
• Manuscript lecture notes and coursework.
• Approximately 300 leaves.
• Text on both sides.
• Bound in contemporary brown pressboard binder with the compiler’s title and ownership inscription on the upper cover.

While sets of formal mimeographed lecture notes from Feynman classes occasionally appear on the market (usually his 1951 course High Energy Phenomena and Meson Theories) manuscript notes made in real time during classes are much rarer

The present set is comprehensive, neat, and very readable, and there is a delightful immediacy about Newburn’s prose reactions to various topics. Also included are his returned homework and tests, graded and often snarkily annotated in red pencil by the TA. These notes offer a unique opportunity to study Feynman’s teaching methods and the student response to them, as well as the wider history of high-level physics education in America.

Following the conclusion of the Manhattan Project in 1945, Feynman worked as a professor at Cornell but quickly became restless, unsatisfied with the school’s scientific culture and overshadowed by Hans Bethe. So in 1949 he readily accepted a position offered by Robert Bacher, Caltech’s new head of physics. Feynman would spend the rest of his career there, and the university became intimately tied to his growing legend. It was at Caltech that he presented the revolutionary Lectures in Physics, published in 1964. That series completely reinvisioned the way that physics was taught to undergraduates, incorporating the cutting-edge science that Feynman had participated in, and it would therefore be worthwhile to investigate differences between material presented in both the Lectures and the present course notes.

Ray L. Newburn earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astronomy at Caltech in 1953 and 1954 and completed his PhD work in 1956. He then joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ‘for the summer’ and stayed for the rest of his career, retiring in 1999 but maintaining his connections to the laboratory as a contractor. ‘In his long tenure with JPL, he participated in the development of plans for lunar and planetary exploration’, including the Mariner 2 and Cassini missions (STARDUST biography). Much of Newburn’s career was focused on comets, including the Giotto and Vega missions to Halley’s comet, and he was the Chief Environmental Modeler and head of the imaging team for the STARDUST mission, which was the first to return samples from a comet, and also the first to return samples of any kind from beyond the Moon’s orbit. He was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and has an asteroid named in his honor.