Wisdom Of The Week

Feynman was also a renowned educator. Those lucky enough to have attended his lectures have the best sense of how his agile mind operated. He taught a first-year course at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena: ‘Physics X’, in which students would ask him anything and he’d think on his feet. Feynman loved to astound, and often refused to provide solutions, to spur students on intellectually. The careful notes of attendees have been published as books and articles, bolstering his reputation as a master lecturer. One such from Caltech was the three-volume The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964). Another, 1959’s The Theory of Fundamental Processes, is based on notes taken by Peter Carruthers and Michael Nauenberg, two students at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, when Feynman was a visiting lecturer there in 1958. Nauenberg told me how, during the first lecture, Feynman walked in, glanced at the blackboard, wildly erased the equations on it and declared that they would all learn the whole of physics from scratch. Within a few weeks, the course proceeded from elementary quantum mechanics to Feynman’s rules for particle-physics calculations. The Character of Physical Law (1967), another of Feynman’s works, emerged from lectures he delivered at Cornell six years later.

Feynman’s books urge us to explore the world with open-minded inquisitiveness, as if encountering it for the first time. He worked from the idea that all of us could aspire to take the same mental leaps as him. But, of course, not every ambitious young magician can be a Harry Houdini. Whereas other educators might try to coddle those who couldn’t keep up, Feynman never relented. The essence of his philosophy was to find something that you can do well, and put your heart and soul into it. If not physics, then another passion — bongos, perhaps.

- Richard Feynman at 100