> I was surprised to find that there is no mention or acknowledgment of me or my fellow volunteered student editors in any of the three volumes of the lectures. When I asked a Caltech archivist about the omission, I was told that the student editors didn’t do well and that the approach was abandoned. Decades later, Sands told me that he and Leighton did the editing themselves. I find it a curious rewrite of history.
Perhaps time for a revision of the history of how the Lectures were produced in written form?
> The following has been added to Kip Thorne's Preface in the current ("New Millennium") edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics:
>> Note added 13 May, 2022: In addition to Caltech professors who contributed to the making of FLP, a number of graduate students and staff helped with the technical details of its preparation. The Forewords written by Feynman's coauthors Leighton and Sands acknowledge these helpers, but while Volumes II and III give lists, Volume I includes only a general acknowledgment. After consulting knowledgeable colleagues I have constructed the following, likely incomplete, list of people who, I believe, deserve credit for their help with the technical details of preparing Volume I: Alan Title, Marylou Clayton, Julie Curcio, Don Groom, James Hartle, Tom Harvey, Fanny Warren, Clyde Zaidins, and Barbara Zimmerman. (I would welcome suggestions for additions or corrections to this list; please send them to me at Caltech.)
This addition already appears in the online edition of FLP, and will appear in print starting with the next printing of FLP, which is currently underway.
> Michael Gottlieb
> Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics New Millennium Edition
“ Whereas most of his preceding lectures simply come to an end, Feynman ends this one more philosophically, speculating that the order in the universe we see today is not a statistical fluctuation but a memory of initial conditions. “
> I was surprised to find that there is no mention or acknowledgment of me or my fellow volunteered student editors in any of the three volumes of the lectures. When I asked a Caltech archivist about the omission, I was told that the student editors didn’t do well and that the approach was abandoned. Decades later, Sands told me that he and Leighton did the editing themselves. I find it a curious rewrite of history.
Perhaps time for a revision of the history of how the Lectures were produced in written form?