Laudable lectures

In William Thomas’s commentary “Elitism in physics: What happens when the profession’s cultural scaffolding comes down? ” (Physics Today, September 2022, page 10), the author notes that Richard Feynman’s famous introductory undergraduate course “proved by his own admission to be of dubious pedagogical value.” Indeed, in his preface to the Feynman Lectures on Physics, Feynman noted that he didn’t think he “did very well by the students.” But as someone who attended Caltech in the 1960s, I’d like to note that I—and it seemed many of my classmates—did not hold that same opinion.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Feynman Lectures formed the basis of Caltech’s two-year sequence in introductory physics. I entered the university as a freshman in the fall of 1966. During the first quarter of the year, the freshman physics lectures (based on the Feynman Lectures) were delivered by Robbie Vogt, a young and charismatic member of the faculty and eventual provost of Caltech. As Vogt concluded his final lecture of the term, we freshmen—all 210 of us—rose as one for a standing ovation. The thunderous applause continued for well over five minutes, with Vogt repeatedly disappearing into a room behind the blackboards only to reappear for “curtain calls.”

The succeeding five quarters were taught by five other faculty members: Edward Stone, a prominent cosmic-ray physicist; Barry Barish, a corecipient of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics; Robert Leighton, a coauthor of the Feynman Lectures and author of Principles of Modern Physics; Jerry Pine, a high-energy experimentalist turned biophysicist and science educator; and John Bahcall, a theorist who established the feasibility of the Bahcall–Davis solar-neutrino experiment. All were treated to warm rounds of applause at the conclusion of their respective quarters of instruction. I consider Feynman’s physics lectures one of the high points of my undergraduate days at Caltech.