[mlyle]

Yah. He didn't write the Feynman Lectures on Physics. He just came up with the unique arguments in them and gave the lectures at Caltech; it fell to Leighton and Sands to do most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book.

And his other books-- they're just his stories, trying to capture the characteristic style in which he talked, while editing it to be a cohesive written work.

This criticism is maybe valid for QED-- I am not sure what fraction of that he was really involved in-- but not the rest of his body of work. Is this supposed to be bad?

[codelieb]

You appear to be parroting the nonsense from Collier's "I hate Feynman" videos. Feynman gave the FLP lectures at Caltech, which were recorded and photographed, but at that time there was no intention of making them into a book. Leighton and Sands (with the help of some secretaries and grad. students) transcribed these lectures, and then lightly edited them, for use by Caltech students as study notes. These fell into the hands of publishers a couple years later, and they were the ones who proposed turning them into a book. I am now the Editor of those books. To say Feynman "didn't write" FLP may be true in the most literal sense that he did not set pen to paper, but the content is his, as you can easily verify by going to The Feynman Lectures Website, where you can listen to the recordings and see the photos of the original lectures and compare them to the book - they are the same, except for very minor changes that would be required to make any spoken lecture readable.

[mlyle]

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980929 , posted days before your comment.

In retrospect, I should have put "just" in quotes. I think that would have made intent more clear.

[rimunroe]

Do you mean he didn’t write the lectures he gave to students? I know the books weren’t put together by him and were substantially edited, but I thought the original lectures as delivered by him were either all or largely his work.

I once worked through part of the first volume of his lectures in the published book while listening to the recordings of him partly out of curiosity to see how much the original lectures as he gave them matched the ones which were compiled and published in written form (which I already knew was something not done by him). I came away feeling impressed one could either stick so closely to some lecture notes when lecturing and/or put together a written work which so closely matched a spoken one without coming across as being a transcript. It’s quite the accomplishment and one which I felt was a credit to everyone involved.

[mlyle]

Yah, I was saying the volumes.

> put together a written work which so closely matched a spoken one without coming across as being a transcript.

Leighton deserves the credit for this. Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

[rimunroe]

> Leighton deserves the credit for this. Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

It's pretty clear he also used the recordings of the lectures themselves. Otherwise there'd be a much bigger difference between the lectures as presented in the books and the audio recordings[1] of him actually giving the lectures. Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them.

> Feynman did share his notes, but Feynman's notes are.. an adventure.. to work through.

I don't doubt his notes would be, however they also used the audio recordings of and took notes during the lectures themselves for the books. I'm not sure how much they relied on Feynman's notes themselves though. It's been about 15 years since I last read and listened to them together, but I recall the experience of the combined activity being that the book was surprisingly close to being a transcript of what he said (including references to figures which the books reproduced).

This is why I thought it was impressive that the book didn't read like a transcript on its own. I rarely encountered professors who gave such well-structured lectures, but it seems like something Feynman could not only give prepared lectures in this way, but could do this off the cuff as well.

[1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html

[mlyle]

> Leighton deserves a lot of credit, but the lectures Feynman gave were substantially similar enough that it's absurd not to act as though he didn't co-author them

I'm sorry that it's difficult to convey tone on the internet. My intent was to highlight that absurdity that seemed to be present in the comment that I replied to-- Feynman only came up with the physics and gave the lectures, but didn't actually "write the book" is not much of a gotcha as far as the accomplishment goes.

It doesn't take away from Feynman, but it maybe adds a lot to each of the Leightons that they could capture such a range of ideas and Feynman's tone so well without simply repeating things verbatim in that transcript style.

> (including references to figures which the books reproduced).

Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction. So Leighton definitely deserves a whole lot of respect for producing the work, from audio recordings, a few spare photographs, and notes. Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this:

https://i.imgur.com/zQessy9.png

(And it seems Feynman gave this 60 minute lecture quickly wandering between history, geometrical ideas, and dynamics-- that still seems well organized-- with these few pages of sparse notes).

[rimunroe]

No worries! That makes sense. I got tripped up by "just came up with the unique arguments [...] and gave the lectures" and "Leighton and Sands [did] most of the work of knitting it into a cohesive, coherent book". It felt like glossing over the degree to which the books' contents match the words he spoke.

> Yes, this is one of the areas of significant challenges in reproduction.

I feel this deeply. I'm very slow at writing by hand and have trouble paying attention to what someone's saying if I'm also trying to simultaneously summarize it. In college I solved this by becoming very, very swift with LaTeX. My pure math notes were easiest, but I struggled with physics notes the most. I settled on a middle ground of learning TikZ and making a bunch of LaTeX macros for common stuff. This did well enough for most simple diagrams. I'd fall back to hand-copying more complicated ones and just typing the text. I'd either scan the drawings afterward and add annotations as needed or convert fully into LaTeX. Converting these hand-drawn ones into LaTeX was a ton of work. After doing this for a short bit, I realized that I was remembering the more complicated diagrams better than the easier ones. I figured out that being able to take almost verbatim notes easily wasn't making me absorb the material at all, so I started spending more time afterward tidying everything up to make things stick a bit better.

> Even more impressive is what the Goodsteins did with the "Lost Lecture" to recreate the figures from just a few pages of surviving notes that looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/zQessy9.png

That's really cool. That note looks about as inscrutable as the ones I have from when I was being taught a crash course in QCD.

[ecshafer]

Feynman's ability to give an off the cuff lecture is astounding and probably an area where he is world class. I think of the one recorded interview with him, and his shockingly deep answers to simple questions that were off the cuff. His response to "why do magnets push/pull eachother" and what the issue is with asking "why" requires a lot of introspection is stellar.

[rimunroe]

I linked the "why do magnets do that?" interview elsewhere in the comments, but if anyone else missed it I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q

[mlyle]

It's from Fun to Imagine-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1ww1IXRfTA