Walking Randomly

As I navigate through the twists and turns that life brings, I occasionally come across people who seem to be working on some higher plane to everyone else.  Richard Feynman was one of those people.  Richard Kac couldn’t have put it better when he said of Feynman

There are two kinds of geniuses: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘magicians’. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they’ve done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre.

I never met Feynman of course as he died of cancer back in 1988 when I was only 10 but I have read masses about him.  I first learned about him from my high school physics teacher who lent me a book called Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman which contained hardly any physics but a lot of stories about a man who was intensely interested in the world about him.  I’ve bought that book several times now because I keep lending it to people who go on to lend it to people!

Not only was Feynman a Nobel prize winner but he was also a first class physics teacher and over 40 years ago he delivered a set of introductory lectures at Caltech which are widely considered to be among the best ever written.  These were later converted to a set of books that have been continuously in print ever since and tend to be on the bookshelves of many people interested in physics.

In 1964 Feynman delivered a different set of lectures called The Character of Physical Law at Cornell University.  This set of lectures was recorded by the BBC and it turns out that Bill Gates recently bought the rights to them.  In a wonderful display of philanthropy Mr Gates has made these lectures freely available to the world on Microsoft’s Project Tuva site.

Sadly, however, the lectures have been delivered via Microsoft’s proprietary Silverlight system.  This is just fine if you are a user of Windows or Mac OS X but Microsoft hasn’t released Silverlight for Linux operating systems.  The practical upshot of this is that if you run Linux on your computer then you can’t watch the lectures.  There is a community effort which is producing a free version of Silverlight (called Moonlight) but sadly Project Tuva doesn’t work on systems running Moonlight (at the time of writing at least).

Not all is lost though thanks to YouTube.  Many of the Feynman lectures have been split up into bite sized chunks and made available by users such as this one.  I’ve just finished watching the first lecture and loved it :)