Foreword to Feynman Lectures on Gravitation

During the 1962–63 academic year, Richard Feynman taught a course at Caltech on gravitation. Taking an untraditional approach to the subject, Feynman aimed the course at advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who were familiar with the methods of relativistic quantum field theory—in particular, with Feynman-diagram perturbation theory in quantum electrodynamics. Two of the postdocs, Fernando B. Morinigo and William G. Wagner, wrote up notes for the course. These were typed, and copies were sold in the Caltech bookstore for many years. The notes were not published, but they were widely distributed, and because of their unique insights into the foundations of physics, they had a significant influence on many of the people who read them. Morinigo and Wagner performed a great service by preserving so well this piece of Feynman’s legacy. Now, thanks to the efforts of Brian Hatfield, the lectures are finally being published in this volume, and so are becoming readily available to a broader audience and to posterity. In preparing the notes for publication, Hatfield has corrected minor errors and improved the notation, but otherwise has adhered to the original typescript prepared by Morinigo and Wagner. (Only two brief passages were deleted.) Feynman delivered 27 lectures in all, one each week over the full 1962–63 academic year. The class met in a tiny room with just two rows of seats, on the third floor of Caltech’s East Bridge Laboratory; no more than 15 people attended a typical lecture. (At least two of the students attending, James Bardeen and James Hartle, later made significant contributions of their own to gravitation theory.) The lectures were taped, but because they were highly informal, Morinigo and Wagner found it necessary to revise the material substantially in order to produce a readable set of notes. For the most part, Wagner worked on the mathematical presentation and Morinigo worked on the prose. The resulting notes were then reviewed by Feynman, he made various corrections and additions, and the notes were distributed to the students. The notes are pervaded by Feynman’s spirit and are sprinkled with his jokes, but inevitably his idiosyncratic use of language has been only partially preserved.