Lectures on Gravitation.

£975 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

Early Xerox'd copy of this important lecture series, originally published as a mimeograph by the Caltech bookstore in 1963. From the library of physicist Charles Needham (1936-2013), who earned his PhD at the University of New Mexico at Alburquerque in 1971 with a thesis on Cephid variable stars. Needham likely made this copy from an original mimeograph that he borrowed from the library or from a colleague. He may have forgotten to copy the title, as he has inserted his own typed title page before the Xerox'd text. Feynman's course on gravitation was presented to graduate students and postdocs in the afternoons at the same time that he was giving the morning undergraduate lectures that would become the famous Feynman Lectures on Physics. Two postdocs, Fernando B. Morinigo and William G. Wagner, made typed notes based on the taped lectures, and these were mimeographed and sold in the bookstore 'for many years' (Preskill Thorne', foreword to The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, 1995). Feynman gave twenty-seven lectures in all, but he only found time to check the first eleven, 'making various corrections and additions'. They are 'pervaded by Feynman's spirit and sprinkled with his jokes, but inevitably his idiosyncratic use of language has been only partially preserved' (Preskill Thorne). The earliest copies sold at Caltech therefore only included eleven lectures, as here, though in 1971 a further five were added. 'Because of their unique insights into the foundations of physics

• Binding: Hardcover

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