My theory is something I call "The Feynman effect". Feynman has a talent of making the listener believe that they (the listener) understand everything at a very deep level. So it gives the feeling he's an amazing teacher -- and if you don't actually try to apply that knowledge, you might never notice that you're wrong.
I realized that after reading his lecture on "the principle of least action" coming out with the feeling that I deeply understand (among other things) calculus of variations - a field I didn't even know existed until I read that. So I tried to use it -- and realized that, other than recreating Feynman's example, I can't really use it for anything.
I shared the sentiment with others over lunch the next day (a couple of other undergrads and two graduate students), and they were all familiar with that feeling....
I interviewed a Caltech grad for a job once. She was completely qualified (overqualified?) and I figured that out in all of about 3 minutes. So I asked her if she'd taken Feynman. She smiled and said she'd sat in on a seminar where he lectured and, similar to your Feynman effect, she said that he had the ability to take the most complicated idea, crystalize it, explain it and that you would understand it. This effect lasted for about 5 minutes after which you would confuse yourself.
BTW, she didn't get the job which was not my doing. My boss was a woman who felt threatened by having another woman who was massively smarter than she was.
As for Feynman, I'm more than ok with his lectures. Clarity is no substitute for application but it damn well helps application.
I wish I could frame this comment for every first-year student. The profound irony of the Feynman Lectures is that although they are revered as master works, the whole endeavor was a miserable failure.
Feynman was teaching an intro sequence, and he delivered a lovely set of lectures that grad students and professors enjoyed. We still give newly minted physics majors a lovely bound copy of the Lectures, because some of us are in on the joke.
It depends on a person. For me the lectures deserve all the praise they've got and more.
I've read Feynman lectures twice. First time in the secondary school -- it was above my head but it gave me an understanding, the right models to work with later. The second time I read it in the university after I'd already studied the topics by other means (through complex math using e.g., Landau and Lifshitz textbooks). Now, I could appropriate the full depth of the lectures.
It is often useful to have several perspectives on a subject , to know it better in particular to solve complex problems (the more tools you can apply, the better).
Oh, I definitely agree. I appreciate the perspective. The Feynman lectures are great at giving an intuition and perhaps a general framework for thought.
What they don’t give you are tools; like you say, you had to learn them in other places before really appreciating the lecture.
But those lectures do seem to leave many people with the feeling they also got the tools and not just the gist.
They are enjoyable. They are informative. But they are not at a textbook level, even though they leave the impression that they are.
The reason why they are so popular is because school/textbook leaves the opposite impression to most people, i.e. we're given tools without the "gist".
I'd been in a prep school for 3 years, and people were just regurgitating what they had been shown, applying formulas with a very vague idea of what they're doing or what their results means.
School is just about remembering things and finding patterns.
There's a Feynman story in one of his books where he shows a university class a french curve (a very curvy plastic shape used in technical drawing) and explains to them it has the amazing property that no matter how you turn it, the lowest point is tangent to the horizon. No one in the class realized he was just messing with them.
The point of lecture is not to teach you the subject throughly. That’s what practice is for. The point of lecture is to get you so profoundly interested in the concepts you’re learning that you’ll go and do the practice without feeling like you’re doing any work.
Happens in other fields too.
When I worked at Tera, I (and plenty of others) would talk to Burton Smith in the halls.
Whatever the topic, he always made us feel included and smart.
Then, after the conversation, as we moved apart, our IQ would drop and our understanding would fail.
I think you could get a relatively solid math framework just by studying physics and learning the math concept when you encounter it in your physics education.
Susskind is great, and he's very much inspired by Feynman.
Of course there are plenty of good professors that will help you understand physics, but I haven't heard anyone lecture in such an interesting way, have you?
he said it himself literally in the preface to the lectures
"The question, of course, is how well this experiment has succeeded. My own point of view—which, however, does not seem to be shared by most of the people who worked with the students—is pessimistic. I don’t think I did very well by the students. When I look at the way the majority of the students handled the problems on the examinations, I think that the system is a failure. Of course, my friends point out to me that there were one or two dozen students who—very surprisingly—understood almost everything in all of the lectures, and who were quite active in working with the material and worrying about the many points in an excited and interested way. These people have now, I believe, a first-rate background in physics—and they are, after all, the ones I was trying to get at. But then, "The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)"
I think his remarks need to be put in perspective. Compared to any other college lecturers, how do his lectures measure up?
Sure, a couple dozen students who attended out of hundreds perfectly understood everything in the lectures and demonstrated it in exams to Feynman's unreasonably high standards. Does that mean that all of the rest failed to gain any substantial physics knowledge which was valuable in their academic or professional careers? I think not.
Looking at the wikipedia entry for the lectures (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feynman_Lectures_on_Physic...), it says that Feynman taught "the course" once. It's clearly a beefy 3-course sequence that was taught over the span of 3 years. Sounds like it could have been 1 semester a year for each of the three courses in the physics intro sequence. How many students is that? Somewhere in the low hundreds, I guess. 5-10% of the students with "perfect" scores could be "two dozen". That's not unusual and not a failure if larger fractions got a good-enough grounding in physics at Caltech to proceed. I think they did.
Feynman's remarks, I think, are an elliptical self-deprecating way of saying the lectures didn't meet his own standards. That doesn't mean they were "a failure".
i'll leave it to the guy who designed and ran the course to give me an assessment of it over some random that wishfully compiles circumstantial evidence (like how long the courses were taught for).
