Feynman lectures on the web - thanks to Bill Gates

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 15 July 2009 11:33

IT Industry - Strategy

Microsoft Research, Microsoft and its chairman, Bill Gates, have launched a Web site that makes the 1964 lectures of physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time.

The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964 were hugely influential and, Microsoft says, "Gates purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called "The Character of Physical Law," to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science."

The historic lectures and related content can be seen at http://research.microsoft.com/tuva . The name 'Tuva' was chosen because of Feynman's lifelong fascination with the small Russian republic of Tuva, located in the heart of Asia.

These, however, are not the lectures on which the famed book "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" was based. Those lectures were given at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1961–63. These became his most widely read work and are widely regarded as the best introductory set of lectures on physics ever written. According to Wikipedia, Addison-Wesley released in CD format all the audiotapes of these lectures, over 103 hours in total, after remastering the sound and clearing the recordings with Feynman.

Curtis Wong, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, has "enhanced the experience of viewing the lectures by integrating the historic video with a Microsoft Silverlight-based video player that allows viewers to search the lectures for references to particular subjects, take notes that are synchronised to the video, and click on hyperlinks to related Web content, among other customised operations," according to Microsoft.

"There is a lot of public interest in building innovative educational resources online," Wong said. "This is an opportunity to take some existing educational content and utilise software and the wealth of resources available on the Web to create a richer learning experience. And because people can annotate the lectures with their own comments and links to related resources, I expect this experience to become richer and richer over time."

According to Feynman's entry on Wikipedia "During his lifetime and after his death [1988], Feynman became one of the most publicly known scientists in the world. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology (creation of devices at the molecular scale)...He was also known as a prankster, juggler, safecracker, and a proud amateur painter and bongo player. Richard Feynman was regarded as an eccentric and a free spirit. He liked to pursue multiple, seemingly unrelated, paths, such as biology, art, percussion, Maya hieroglyphs, and lock picking."