Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motions of Planets Around the Sun

by David L Goodstein (Author), Judith R Goodstein (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1997

  $12.27

  On 14 March 1964 Richard Feynman, one of the greatest scientific thinkers of the 20th Century, delivered a lecture entitled 'The Motion of the Planets Around the Sun'. For thirty years this remarkable lecture was believed to be lost. But now Feynman's work has been reconstructed and explained in meticulous, accessible detail, together with a history of ideas of the planets' motions. The result is a vital and absorbing account of one of the fundamental puzzles of science, and an invaluable insight into Feynman's charismatic brilliance.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1996

  $4.56

  Richard Feynman's fame rests to a large extent on his picaresque exploits, but he was also a theoretical physicist of some significance. The discovery of the notes for his major lecture on the motion of planets around the sun, presented in this book, allows readers an insight into the workings of his mind. The book relates how the notes came to be lost, and how they came to be found again and reconstructed. The lecture concerns the fact that, when a planet or any other body arcs through space under the influence of gravity, it traces out a specific set of mathematical curves. Feynman considers why nature chooses to trace out in the sky those - and only those - elegant geometrical constructions.