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A Lecture by Richard Feynman
by Jonathan Young

This past November 9, the legendary Richard Feynman gave a lecture entitled "The relation of mathematics to physics." The lecture, of course, was on film, but nevertheless, it brought Feynman to life, especially for those who had only read of him in books and journals.

Richard Feynman

In the lecture, Feynman described examples of how the beauty of mathematics aids physicists in characterizing natural phenomena and how physicists employ mathematics to construct models to formulate theories and laws. He provided a general overview of the laws of physics and carefully analyzed a selection of them to bring out their common features and unify them into a more general framework that led to a deeper understanding. A particularly memorable point of the lecture was Feynman's conviction that the importance of a physical law rests on not "how clever we are to have found it out, but...how clever nature is to pay attention to it." One physical law that Feynman revisited time and again was the Law of Gravitation. From giving a brief historical tour of its discovery and illustrating the mathematics behind it, this law was the prime example of the interconnectedness between physics and mathematics. Other universal principles that Feynman considered were those of symmetry, time-irreversibility, and conservation, and how they bridged classical and modern physics. Mathematics is the language of physics, and Feynman felt that if there were a complete theory of all natural phenomena, its foundations would be a set of self-contained mathematical axioms. The lecture was delivered in a masterful way that left the audience with a more profound appreciation of nature.

The lecture was part of a series called "The Character of Physical Law." These lectures were given as part of the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University in November of 1964, and recorded for television by the BBC. At the time, Feynman was a professor at the California Institute of Technology, and had already risen to fame; he would win the Nobel Prize a year later. What made these lectures so more remarkable was that Feynman had an uncanny ability to convey the excitement of science and to explain complex concepts in an accessible manner.