Feynman’s Lost Lecture and Invented Dreams

On March 13, 1964, a physics professor at Cal Tech walked to the podium of his classroom and announced he would lecture that day on “The Motion of Planets Around the Sun.”

In a tape recording of that long-forgotten class, the students can be heard climbing into their seats. A bell rings loudly in the background. Someone asks the professor for the date. “I don’t know,” he says, in a perfect manifestation of absent-mindedness. Another voice mutters the date in his ear and the professor repeats it for the class.

“Three, thirteen, sixty-four,” he says.

Half a lifetime ago. The Sixties--at least as we remember them--had not really started. Vietnam was only a distant place on the map and no one outside the world of physics had ever heard of the professor, Richard Feynman.

It is a measure of something--precisely what, I’m not sure--that when the tape recording of this lecture was discovered recently at Cal Tech, it was regarded as a treasure so valuable that a New York publishing house snapped it up and published it under the title, “Feynman’s Lost Lecture.” At the Bookstar where I shop it is now displayed prominently on a stand by the cashier.

The book also includes the story of the tape’s discovery by Judith Goodstein, Cal Tech’s archivist. And her husband, physics professor David Goodstein, relates the difficulties of reconstructing the blackboard notes that accompanied the lecture and why Feynman chose his topic.

Finally, the publisher, W. W. Norton, includes an audio CD made from the tape so all of us can hear Feynman talk about the mathematical properties of planet motion on that afternoon 32 years ago.

Actually, anyone familiar with the myths and adoration now surrounding Richard Feynman will not be surprised to see one of his lectures grabbed for the mass market, especially if it can be described as long lost. Eight years after his death, Feynman has grown into a sort of academic Elvis, ever larger and more tantalizing with each passing season.

No one in academic life, with the exception of Alfred Einstein, has so provoked the public imagination as Feynman. He may have conducted the most famous science experiment in television history when, during the investigation into the space shuttle Challenger disaster, he dipped an O-ring into a glass of ice water and revealed that it lost its sealing capacity.

Feynman’s own two books about his life--”Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”--were bestsellers in the 1980s and continue to sell well. The BBC has produced two films of his exploits in science.

Last year, the interviews from the BBC films were converted to another book on his life, titled “No Ordinary Genius.” And recently a new biography of Feynman became a bestseller.

The real mystery is why Feynman has turned into a small phenomenon. He was a giant of 20th century physics, one of a handful of men who overthrew Newtonian physics and created the new universe of relativity and quantum mechanics.

“When Feynman died [in 1988], we formed a committee at Cal Tech to find someone who could replace him,” says David Goodstein. “We drew up a list of virtually every great physicist in the world. Then we gave up. We realized you cannot go out and find another Richard Feynman. You simply hope that another one comes along and that your university is lucky enough to have him.”

But mere academic greatness did not elevate Feynman into the Elvis of the intellectual world. When he won his Nobel Prize in 1965, for example, he shared it with two other scientists. They have long been forgotten in the public mind while Feynman’s myth has only grown larger.

Here’s my theory about the Feynman phenomenon: he happened to land in the perfect place--Southern California and Cal Tech--at the perfect time, the early 1960s. Without them, Richard Feynman would have ended up with his Nobel Prize and little more.

That may seem a peculiar claim to make for Southern California because we do not think of our region as a great cultivator of intellectual giants. But Feynman always wanted something more than academic greatness, and Southern California gave its blessing to that quest. It allowed him to expand his persons into one of mythic proportions, specifically the great scientist who also loved to nightcrawl through topless bars, who played bongo drums at the professional level, who chased dancing girls in Vegas.

Feynman loved creating this myth of the very serious man who also passionately sought the good life. Or, at least, the good life as he saw it. He called this style, “mixing paints.” And Los Angeles allowed it, even condoned it.

In Southern California, Feynman created the picture of a man who had found the secret of a life well-lived. That is to say, a man who remained in pursuit of his personal passions whether it was work or play, who did not regard the social conventions, who always, always stayed interested.

If Feynman has grown into an intellectual Elvis, it is because he seems, even in death, to offer us this secret. We do not need to understand quantum mechanics to receive his gift and remain intrigued.

Even as he died, Feynman pursued a quest to explore a little-known land called Tannu Tuva. Some of his friends refused to believe it existed. But, in the end, it didn’t really matter.

They understood that Feynman was being Feynman, chasing his last dream. And, as always, it was allowed.