Thanks for the info! I was a SURF student at Caltech in summer 2005, and I remember walking around campus wondering in which office Feynman had worked. At first I thought his office was in the Norman Bridge Lab, they I found it was at Lauritsen, but I didn’t know the exact office until now. So, thanks for answering a question that was left unanswered for way too long!

And of course, have fun working at Feynman’s desk!

Um, it’s “Caltech.” Don’t ask why. Even though it’s an abstraction of “California Institute of Technology,” most Techers get annoyed if you spell it “CalTech” or “Cal Tech” or “ITT Tech” or “Cal Poly.”

Anyway, to Sean, I didn’t know you were there now! Have fun; I have fond memories of the place and I liked that everyone there LIKES SCIENCE. Not like MIT, where people do it for the glory and stardom. Or maybe this is just a difference in an undergrad versus grad student lens.

I’ve already told the story before about the night he tried to steal my date at an undergrad mixer.

Elliot

I’m interested in what physicists think of Feynman’s lectures. My impression is that the books never worked very well as textbooks, in part because, despite their rather modest math level, they attempted to convey the meaning of physical ideas, i.e. they were too ambitious.

This is true. The Feynman lecture books would have worked well as texts for instruction in advanced physics, but not for introductory instruction. Start with Halliday & Resnick (which I did in the late 1960s) and then continue with the Feynman books (which I also did) for advanced students.

That said, it should be appreciated that the most interesting PBS Nova program ever broadcast was the one with Feynman. They edited out all of the questions from the interviewer and just had his responses. What was interesting is that Feynman’s responses made physics seem so easy. Which, quite frankly, it is–it is the physicists and (especially) the mathematicians that make physics seem so difficult.

Really it would be cool?..although your mile wide grin says a lot

feynman was a revolution of one, a real alternative.
there really have been few in science like this.
as with all information (re: the feynman lectures, landau, the manual that tells you how best to cook chicken in a microwave), aren’t we looking to digest all perspectives to perhaps create new innovative ideas and direction?
and not follow in blind faith.

If an inkblot appears spontaneously on a piece of paper on Feynman’s desk will that be proof of a reverse microstate blackhole?

Maybe the “inkblot” is like Piglet describing the Heffalump,. in Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne?

It depends on what you want to see?

Come now. Even *Feynman* never made such claims about his tool.

‘(Schwarz remembers meeting Richard Feynman in the elevators during these dark years. Feynman would say to him, with a smirk, “And how many dimension are we in today, John?”)

- http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=457#comment-15841

I know from my days as an editor of math and stat textbooks that most undergrads would rather memorize seven pages of formulas than wrap their heads around the meaning of one equation–they learn proofs the way that traditional Muslims learn the Koran. Books that focused on conceptual understanding were often flops in the classroom, even if they were widely admired by profs. Is that the problem with Feynman?