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.jpg) Feynman at the blackboard, holding theSpecial Lecture: The Motion Of Planets Around The Sun | |
| Author | Richard Feynman |
|---|---|
| Subject | celestial mechanics |
| Genre | textbook |
| Published | W. W. Norton & Company |
Publication date | 1996 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | book |
| Pages | 191 |
| ISBN | 978-0393039184 |
| OCLC | 33078849 |
| 521/.3 | |
| LC Class | QB603.M6 G66 1996 |
Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun is a book based on a lecture byRichard Feynman. Restoration of the lecture notes and conversion into book form was undertaken byCaltech physicistDavid L. Goodstein and archivistJudith R. Goodstein.[1]
Feynman had given the lecture on the motion of bodies at Caltech on March 13, 1964, but the notes and pictures were lost for a number of years and consequently not included inThe Feynman Lectures on Physics series. The lecture notes were later found, but without the photographs of his illustrativechalkboard drawings. One of the editors, David L. Goodstein, stated that at first without the photographs, it was very hard to figure out what diagrams he was referring to in the audiotapes, but a later finding of his own private lecture notes made it possible to understand completely the logical framework with which Feynman delivered the lecture.
You can explain to people who don't know much of the physics, the early history... how Newton discovered... Kepler's Laws, and equal areas, and that means it's toward the sun, and all this stuff. And then the key - they always ask then, "Well, how do you see that it's an ellipse if it's the inverse square?" Well, it's God damned hard, there's no question of that. But I tried to find the simplest one I could.[2]
In a non-course lecture delivered to a freshman physics audience, Feynman undertakes to present an elementary, geometric demonstration ofNewton's discovery of the fact thatKepler's first observation, that the planets travel in elliptical orbits, is a necessary consequence of Kepler's other two observations.
The structure of Feynman's lecture:
The audio recording of the lectures also includes twenty minutes of informal Q&A at the blackboard with students who had attended the lecture.
In the 1964 lecture, Feynman presents an elementary geometric proof (i.e., in the style of Isaac Newton's 1687Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica) ofKepler's first law. Feynman's geometric proof relies on the concept of ahodograph. Feynman reported that his motivation for presenting a proof different from Newton's was that he had failed to understand Newton's original proof in thePrincipia. A proof with ideas similar to Feynman's had already been published byJames Clerk Maxwell in his bookMatter and Motion (1877).[3][4][5]
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