College: Teaching from Feynman

MAR 01, 1967

At the college level considerable emphasis has been placed on professional preparation. The Feynman lectures, the Berkeley and MIT courses all have this orientation. Nevertheless, serious attempts are being made to provide nonscientists with a modern, meaningful introduction to physical science by such projects as Physical Science for Nonscience Students and Science Courses for Baccalaureate Education. Not everyone is happy with the changes in physics education, but there is little disagreement that coordination and assistance of the sort the Commission on College Physics can offer is very valuable.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3034227

Howard P. Stabler

THE FEYNMAN LECTURES on physics are widely recognized as invaluable source books for teachers and prospective textbook authors, but there is less unanimity regarding suitability of the published lectures as textbooks for students. (For example, two excellent reviews and a different evaluation have appeared.) I am reporting on the two years at Williams College during which my introductory course students and I worked with the first volume. I had the privilege of attending Richard Feynman’s lectures at Cal Tech before volume 1 existed, and my perspective is inevitably affected by this experience and the fact that I adopted as textbook for the present term “Mechanics,” Volume 1 of the Berkeley Physics Course. This text was adopted primarily to effect smoother transition to “Electricity and Magnetism” by E. M. Purcell (volume 2 of the Berkeley series), which had just been selected for the sophomore course.

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References

1. R. P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton, M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics; Vol. 1 (Addison Wesley, Reading, Mass., 1963).
2. S. B. Treiman, PHYSICS TODAY 17, no. 8, 45 (1964); https://doi.org/PHTOAD
E. M. Hafner, Am. J. Phys. 33, 750 (1965).https://doi.org/AJPIAS
3. K. Kumar, Am. J. Phys. 33, 613 (1965).https://doi.org/AJPIAS
4. C. Kittel, W. D. Knight, M. A. Ruderman, Mechanics, Berkeley Physics Course; Vol. 1 (McGraw‐Hill, New York, 1965).

More about the authors

Howard P. Stabler, Williams College.