From Robert Leighton Oral History Interview with Heidi Aspaturian in Pasadena CA, 8 October 1986, courtesy of the Caltech Archives, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.
Leighton: The Feynman course was important, and I played a role there in the editing, and translating “Feynmanese” into English. That was an interesting and exciting time.
In the early 1960s, when [Gerry] Neugebauer and I were talking about infrared, and when I was getting interested in Mariner, along came The Feynman Lectures. That resulted from a project—in which I played some direct role—to redo the freshman physics course. I had some ideas about how to do that, and some of the other people on the freshman physics committee had some ideas as well. But partway through the discussions, Matt Sands said, “Well, really, we should have Dick Feynman present the lectures and have them tape-recorded.” Sands was then a professor of physics at Caltech. He was a very forward type of fellow. He had been on the Los Alamos project as a young person, so he knew Feynman well enough to go and talk to him. But Feynman resisted.
Aspaturian: What was it about Feynman’s lectures that made him the obvious choice for this kind of thing?
Leighton: Feynman has a peculiar property, which is that at the time he’s explaining something, it appears very clear and transparent—you can see how everything fits, and you go away feeling very good about it, as if, “Well, there’s a lot of loose ends there that I want to follow up on; but boy, wasn’t that great!” And about two hours later, like what they say about Chinese food, it’s all gone and you’re hungry again. And you don’t remember quite what happened.
I witnessed it myself. In the late fifties, Feynman gave a talk to a lay audience on the basic ideas of Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 201 East Bridge—the lecture hall was tremendously crowded, of course. In his characteristic way he reduced the subject to its lowest terms, about the 1 – v2/c2—“all you have to learn about is this square root of 1 – v2/c2.” After the lecture, on the way out, I overheard a young lady saying to her escort, “I didn’t understand much of what he said, but it sure was interesting!” Feynman had a way of doing that.
Aspaturian: It sounds like he gave virtual lectures in the sense of virtual particles.
Leighton: [Laughter] Well, that’s right. Yes, bringing the thing out into reality only for a limited time, and then watching it sink back into the sea!
Aspaturian: The idea was to get him out of the vacuum permanently.
Leighton: Yes. So Matt Sands went to Feynman, and Feynman balked, but eventually he agreed to do it. And that was where The Feynman Lectures came from.
Leighton: In his teaching, Feynman tried to organize undergraduate physics into a two-year sequence, which turned out to be three years, because in the first two years he didn’t really get to quantum mechanics—although he did deal with isolated pieces here and there. He started right out with atoms—he didn’t hold back on atoms, leaving them to the chemists, and teaching only pulleys and strings to the freshmen! He pushed the freshmen’s nose into the fact that what physics is is the properties of atoms. In this categorizing way, he tried to make each lecture an independent, self-standing thing. Now, you can only do that to a certain extent, because you’ve got to base your knowledge on some level of mathematics and on some sophistication in the application of mathematics to physics, and things like that.
Anyway, at first it seemed like a great idea to get Feynman to do this. As a matter of fact, it turned out to be a better deal for mature physicists than for the freshmen. Feynman’s course was a little too rich for most of our freshmen: for about 20 percent, it was the ideal thing, absolutely great; for about 60 percent, it was not. Their reaction was more like, “Exactly what do they expect us to learn about in all this?”
I was in charge of the laboratory and the coordination of the course for that first year. I was also in charge of the transcription of the lectures into written form. I explain in the foreword to the book how we expected that the editing was going to be a job for a graduate student—to dot some i’s and cross some t’s, and change a word here and there that the transcriber might have misunderstood or something.
Aspaturian: How did you happen to get the assignment of overseeing the editing?
Leighton: I’d been chairman of the course modification group. You don’t want to hand it to Feynman to run the whole course himself; he’s going to give the lectures, and it takes all of his time to do that. There also had to be laboratory experiments to go with them, and the new material was sufficiently different to call for quite different experiments in the freshman lab. Dr. [H. Victor] Neher, who is now retired, really was in charge of the laboratory part. But I was the coordinator.
The lectures were taped; Feynman used one of those cordless lapel microphones, and we hired a young lady to transcribe them. She was just as happy as could be, listening to that material and typing it. She did a fine job. But about six or eight lectures went by and nothing usable came out the other end. The transcript was verbatim, and in this case verbatim is bad—because Feynman never says anything once: he says it at least two-and-a-half, if not three-and-a-half or four times—and he puts it a different way each time. Then he’ll go on to the next topic for another couple of minutes, and he’ll still be thinking about whether he could have explained his earlier topic better, and then he comes back. The results were loosely organized, modestly disorganized. I wound up, myself, personally, doing the editing for the first volume. It was a full-time job; you couldn’t present the material successfully without paying very careful attention to it.
There’s one particular passage, which I’m sure I could find if I looked in the Feynman book. I’d like you to see what form it was in when it first came out of Feynman. [Laughter] It had to do with physics before Newton and physics after Newton. Feynman’s point was that, before, the world was just a tremendous confusion of darkness and superstition—and afterwards, it was all light and structured and understandable. It was absolutely true, but he was trying to say this in a way that never did quite gel. He had a sentence in there that never had a verb in it! [Laughter]
Aspaturian: How well did you know Feynman when you started?
Leighton: Oh, about as well as I know him today. I guess he and I share a certain aspect of social ineptness: I can’t remember people’s names unless I study them very carefully, and for quite a long time. If I want to catalogue somebody’s name in my head so I can get it again, I have to do it right then. But the trouble is, I’m introduced to somebody just in the middle of a conversation, and the conversation goes on—and who he or she is just drops out of my mind. It’s one of those handicaps; Feynman has it, too. He roomed for at least a term at MIT, I believe, with somebody who was later at Caltech, and he couldn’t remember his name! [Laughter]
Aspaturian: What was it like working with him on The Lectures?
Leighton: What initially came out in the transcript was absolutely raw “Feynmanese” that had to be rough-edited right on the original sheets. After I got his material from each lecture into a form that I thought was ready for typing on the master sheet, it was sent back to the young lady and rendered into a form where it could be shown to Feynman. He would look at the thing now and then, but usually had no comment—that is to say, he was sufficiently satisfied with it.
Another thing is that the lecture came at eleven o’clock, followed by lunch. We would walk to lunch together, and when he was dissatisfied about the way something or other was worked out, there would be questions or comments about, “What could we do to do it better?” There would be ideas and we’d talk. There’d be other people at the lecture—professors and TAs—and there would be sort of a floating lunchtime, which was partly devoted to just talking about that lecture. It was not structured consciously that way, but it was an opportunity to get some ideas.
Aspaturian: Was this originally designed mostly for the benefit of Caltech students?
Leighton: Oh, yes.
Aspaturian: But then it sort of spread out, didn’t it?
Leighton: Well, no physics instructor who was teaching freshman physics could resist having a copy of The Feynman Lectures, whether or not he was using it in his class. This project was financed by a Ford grant, and I don’t know what the royalty figure has come up to. It was an arrangement where the Institute agreed to put any royalties that the texts might accrue into support for similar kinds of activities at Caltech. None of the royalties went to any of the people involved with the lectures themselves. These were academic assignments, so the project was not treated as a copyrighted manuscript. It was just as well. At the time, Feynman said, “We will know whether it sells very well by seeing how big our salaries are in the next four or five years.” [Laughter] And he was right. Our salaries went way up—his, for obvious reasons, and a lot of the rest of us because of being nearby, I guess.
Aspaturian: Your son Ralph got involved in doing something similar.* How did that happen? Has this become a family privilege?
Leighton: I can’t quite remember the order in which things happened, but my wife and I would have dinner parties, and Feynman must have come to one or more of them. My son Ralph was at that time in high school and interested in drumming, and he was friendly with a very musical family in which there were lots of kids and parents who played various instruments—that would bring another group of visitors to our house. On one of these occasions, Feynman heard Ralph and his friends drumming at the other end of the house and, of course, he went in—he was more comfortable with kids anyway. He introduced himself and they invited him to drum. And that led to rather regular drumming sessions by Feynman, Ralph, and a couple of other drop-in friends.
I myself was curious about Feynman’s drumming ability, so I asked Ralph one time, “Well, how good a drummer is Feynman?” He said, “Well, he picks up the rhythms all right, and he’s very fast, but sometimes he has a hard time getting started—but for an old guy, he’s pretty good.” [Laughter] I informed Ralph that he had just spoken of the capabilities of possibly the one person in the world who knew more about how everything in the universe worked than anyone else on Earth at that moment. [Laughter]
Anyway, Ralph’s other musical friends gradually went off to college here and there, but Feynman and Ralph continued drumming together. If you were around Feynman long enough, you’d hear these amazing stories in some random order. Undoubtedly, they gain with the telling, but they’re all quite real. There’s an infinite cauldron, out of which he’d dig one of them up on occasion. That is to say, something in the conversation would recall such-and-such. If you happened to have been near him during some similar conversation, you might have heard the same story—Feynman fixing radios as a kid, or interacting with generals at Los Alamos, for example. And Feynman, he can go on forever: one thing reminds him of another—it’s amazing. The man is absolutely incredible.
Aspaturian: So, there’s an inexhaustible store of lore there.
Leighton: Or, as some people would say, inexcusable! [Laughter]
During their drumming sessions, Ralph made tapes of these stories. Then he transcribed them—first on a typewriter, and then on my computer. Feynman was in favor of this; it was not surreptitious at all. It was simply Ralph saying, “These stories are so great, but they’re like gems slipping through my fingers—can I tape them?”
Then at some stage, I said to Ralph, “How about running the transcripts by me? I’d just like to refresh my memory.” So I read most of them. Now and then I would see some word that was misunderstood.
Aspaturian: You were familiar with most of them?
Leighton: Oh, yes. Only about 20 percent were new to me. I think Ralph and I, without ever discussing it, on our very different projects, realized the same thing about Dick: namely, you should do a minimum of editing on what he says. You should leave it as close to the original as possible, including the mannerisms—although not the repetition. In the physics lectures, I found it absolutely essential to crunch the repetitive material down into what might be a good way to put it, and then let it go at that. Ralph has a lot of talent along those lines. However, that particular job was the first time he had ever tried to write something for publication, so he got some valuable lessons on editing from [Engineering and Science editor] Ed Hutchings.
Aspaturian: Is there a sequel planned?
Leighton: Well, there are still more stories. And then there’s also QED [QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman (Princeton, 1985)] which has come out and has gotten pretty good reviews. And I guess Ralph is still running the tape recorder.
Aspaturian: There were a few things in that book [Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!] that I found did not reflect terribly favorably on Feynman. Was there any discussion about getting rid of some of those?
Leighton: No. That’s the man.
* Ralph Leighton was Feynman’s amanuensis for two collections of reminiscences—Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Norton, 1985), and What Do You Care What Other People Think? (Norton, 1988), which were combined into a single volume, Classic Feynman, in 2005.