Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

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> 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).

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.

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.

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

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

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