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Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun. By David L. Goodstein and Judith R. Goodstein. Norton: 1996. Pp. 224. $35, L16.99. To be published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in July.
RICHARD Feynman, renowned for his sophisticated course of physics lectures at the California Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, also gave guest lectures. Records of only five of them survive. "The Motion of the Planets Around the Sun", the only publishable one, was discovered by Judith Goodstein, the archivist at Caltech, and has now been released on compact disc with notes edited by the physicist David Goodstein.
The theme of the lecture is Kepler's first law (1609), which states that the orbits of the planets are conic sections or ellipses. In 1684, Isaac Newton explained to Edmund Halley that simple principles in dynamics and a...