Received Wisdom

The early 1950s witnessed wild advances in the field of physics, but physics education had yet to catch up. Matthew Sands, at the time teaching graduate-level physics at the California Institute of Technology, felt dismayed with Caltech's program. “I thought it was disgraceful that these hotshot students were not exposed to modern physics,” Sands writes in “Capturing the Wisdom of Feynman,” a Physics Today memoir-style article that recounts the genesis of the famous Feynman lectures. Enlisting the help of Richard Feynman–his Caltech colleague and friend from their Manhattan Project days at Los Alamos–Sands set out to revamp the curriculum.

In his view, it was not a moment too soon, since he noticed that many undergraduate physics majors were reconsidering their chosen field by the time they were juniors. “Their discouragement stemmed at least in part from studying physics for at least two years without encountering any current physics ideas,” Sands writes. He decided to update the program: “In particular, I wanted to see some of the content of modern physics–atoms, nuclei, quanta, and relativity–brought into the introductory course.”

The department head, physicist Robert Bacher, was at first cool to the idea, but eventually acquiesced, appointing Sands and two other Caltech physicists, Robert Leighton and H. Victor Neher, to a task force to reform the program. But because Sands and Leighton had polar ideas (“I viewed Leighton's approach as a rehash of physics course content that had been in vogue for 60 years, and he thought that I was pushing impractical ideas”), they couldn't agree on a syllabus. At an impasse, Sands struck on the idea of asking Feynman, a gifted teacher, to give the lectures, and a compromise was born. Still, it took Sands a few weeks to persuade Feynman. “Finally, he asked me, ‘Has there ever been a great physicist who has presented a course to freshman?’ I told him I didn't think so. His response: ‘I'll do it.’”

Sands describes with admiration, and perhaps a little awe, Feynman's famous style. Beginning as soon as the bell rang, microphone cord hanging round his neck, Feynman would start his lecture: “Each one was a carefully scripted, dramatic production that he had clearly planned in detail.” Even his use of blackboards looked “carefully choreographed” to Sands, who sat in on most of the lectures, which Feynman gave from 1961 to 1963. “The greatest pleasure, though, was watching how he developed the original sequence of ideas and presented them with clarity and style.”

The transcribed, edited version of the two-year lecture sequence was turned into a 1963 book–The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Feynman, Leighton and Sands–which is still used today, although, as Sands recalls from meeting with physics faculties, “I often got the impression that some instructors were wary of trying the Lectures because they feared students might ask questions they were unable to answer.”