FIRST COMPLETE EDITION OF FEYNMAN’S LECTURES ON GRAVITATION
FEYNMAN, Richard P. Lectures on Gravitation 1962-63. Lecture notes by Fernando B. Morinigo and William G. Wagner. Pasadena: California Institute of Technology, 1971. Quarto, staple-bound, original stiff green wrappers. $8800.
First complete edition, very rare, of Feynman’s lectures on gravitation, famous for their highly original approach to general relativity.
“In this tour de force, we get to look over the shoulder of one of the most brilliant physicists of all time as he reinvents the theory of gravitation, at a time when his goal was to produce a consistent and finite quantum theory of gravitation” (fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book_888.html). In 1962-63 Feynman gave a course of 27 lectures on gravitation aimed at advanced graduate students and postdocs, all of which were recorded and transcribed by his students Fernando Morinigo and Bill Wagner. Shortly after the course was over, Feynman reviewed and edited the transcriptions for the first 11 lectures, at which point copies of the 11 lectures were printed, bound, and sold as a textbook in the Caltech bookstore. “In July 1971, a new reproduction of the notes was prepared for bookstore distribution, and Feynman authorized the inclusion of the next 5 lectures. This 1971 publication is therefore the first appearance of the most complete publication of Feynman’s lectures. It was reissued in 1995, with an introduction by John Preskill and Kip Thorne. “It is difficult, in the current climate, where such great interest has developed in unifying the different forces of nature, to realize how revolutionary Feynman’s approach was… this new picture of gravity and general relativity created a completely novel bridge between general relativity and the rest of physics that was not there before. It suggested, just as Feynman hoped it would, that one might use the tools of quantum field theory not only to understand general relativity but also to unify it with the other forces of nature… Feynman did not find that a consistent quantum theory of gravity interacting with matter, without any nasty infinities, could be derived by simply treating general relativity as he had electrodynamics… Nevertheless, every major development that has taken place in the fifty-odd years since Feynman began his work in this area, involving a line of scientists from Feynman to Weinberg to Stephen Hawking and beyond, has built on his approach” (Krauss, pp. 245-9).
“In these lectures, Feynman discards the entire geometric edifice of Einstein’s theory of gravitation (general relativity) and starts from scratch, putting himself and his students in the place of physicists from Venus (who he calls ‘Venutians’) who have discovered the full quantum theories of electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces but have just discovered there is a very weak attractive force between all masses, regardless of their composition… Feynman then argues that the alien physicists would suspect that this new force worked in a manner analogous to those already known, and seek to extrapolate their knowledge of electrodynamics (the quantum theory of which Feynman had played a central part in discovering, for which he would share a Nobel prize in 1965) (fourmilab.ch/documents/reading_list/indices/book_888.html).
“Feynman also expresses a preference for the ‘critical’ value of the density of the universe in §13.1, a prejudice that is widely held today. In §13.2, he gives an interesting (and qualitatively correct) argument to support the density being close to critical: he notes that the existence of clusters and superclusters of galaxies implies that ‘the gravitational energy is of the same order as the kinetic energy of the expansion—this to me suggests that the average density must be very nearly the critical density everywhere.’ This was a rather novel argument in 1962.
“It is evident that, already in the early 60s, Feynman recognized the need for new fundamental principles of physics that would provide a prescription for the initial conditions of the universe. Early in these lectures, in §2.1, he digresses on the foundations of statistical mechanics, so as to express his conviction that the second law of thermodynamics must have a cosmological origin. Note his statement, ‘The question is how, in quantum mechanics, to describe the idea that the state of the universe in the past was something special.’ Thus, Feynman seems to anticipate the fascination with quantum cosmology that began to grip a segment of the physics community some twenty years later. He also stresses, in §1.4 and §2.1, the inappropriateness of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in a cosmological context” (Preskill & Thorne).
Only one copy in auction records. Lawrence M. Krauss,
Quantum Man, 2011; John Preskill & Kip S. Thorne (eds.),
Foreword to Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Original price sticker from Caltech Bookstore on Front wrapper.
Stain to rear wrapper. Near-fine condition.