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Comment by renhanxue | Hacker News Reader

> The speaker says that Feynman didn't write the Feynman lectures. Wrong.

No, she's right, just talking about a different thing.

"The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is a physics textbook. [0] He did prepare his own lecture material, but he did not write the book.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...

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No, she's absolutely wrong about this. The book is based very closely on Feynman's lectures. He wrote the material and gave the lectures. Other people edited that material into book form, but Feynman did the lion's share of the work.

Saying that Feynman didn't write the book is just dishonest, unless you immediately clarify afterwards that Feynman did indeed write almost all of the material in the book, in something very close to its final form.

Seems she isn't interested in dragging a bit of fame and recognition her way.

It's a low effort way to do that when the other party cannot defend himself.

You should watch the whole video. From memory, the video author claims that the books are not based directly on the recordings nor on material that Feynman wrote himself, but rather on lecture notes written by another professor who had to cover for Feynman (who is also listed as one of the authors in the book). She also mentions how those lecture notes from this other professor correct some small mistakes Feynman made in some calculations and diagrams from the lecture. Her claim is that Feynman was not the person who actually wrote the text of the book.

You can literally listen to audio recordings of Feynman delivering the lectures. The book follows those lectures closely.

All lectures that professors deliver have mistakes in them. He produced a massive lecture series covering huge areas of physics over hundreds of hours of class time. There are bound to be typos and small math mistakes.

The complaint that Feynman had an editor makes me think the person who created this YouTube video has no idea how publishing works, not to mention academic publishing.

To me, claiming Feynman didn't write the lecture book is a stretch since they are fundamentally based on his lectures. But I think you are misconstruing some of her arguments and claims. I suggest you watch the whole video, because imo it does a good job at analyzing Feynman's figure.

I mean, for the most part the book is an edited transcription of what he said at the lectures (or, in some cases, what a guest lecturer said). But the lectures weren't scripted, and we know this because his lecture notes are preserved[0] and they do not contain anything like he full text of even a single lecture. They're just lecture notes, not a script. And of course, the book also contain a lot of example problems and graphics - those are mostly the work of Bob Leighton, I believe. There's a reason the book has had so many errata corrected over the years: it was never written and edited in the way a book manuscript would've been written and edited.

[0]: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/Notes.html

Now your complaint is that Feynman didn't literally write down every single word he was going to say? He prepared more than 600 pages of notes and then delivered hundreds of hours of lectures. They were transcribed and published as a book, with normal editing. Feynman is the primary author of that book, for good reason.

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