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There's an excellent article in the April 2005 Physics Today that's a memoir by Matthew Sands, the sole living member of the team that produced the Feynman Lectures. I'd link to it, but alas, reading the article online requires a subscription. There's a copy outside the common room lounge, however. There are a couple of scientific things I really need to just get around to filling out the blasted forms to join - Sigma Xi and the American Physical Society. The former is free and I think the APS has a free 1 year undergrad trial membership (and discounted student rates thereafter).

Sands' memoir has a lot of interesting anecdotes. Apparently Feynman was initially furious about the idea of Leighton and Sands being listed as co-authors of the books. There was another one in which Feynman was discussing with several fellow Caltech faculty as to whether their frosh were up to handling complex exponentials for dealing with problems like diffraction, which was a bit suprising to me since I'd consider it pretty essential math. We hit Swat frosh with it pretty hard both in Physics 6H quantum and in solving damped driven oscillators in Physics 7. I suppose there are math things students today know better than their predecessors, and things we know worse (e.g. trig identities, which would have been a lot more important in the pre-calculator age

Apparently, Addison-Wesley is publishing a new, definitive edition of the Feynman lectures this summer, with revisions and corrections from Feynman. The new edition is also going to contain "Feynman's Tips on Physics" -- another volume consisting of four lectures on solving physics problems that never made it into the original 3 volume set.

The problem: from the publisher, the hardbound set is $137. Hopefully Cornell will get this.

I should really put all 3 volumes of the Feynman lectures on my summer reading list. Having (almost) completed all of basic undergraduate physics, one would be in a good position to appreciate Feynman's insight.

*amused that I'm musing on doing physics rather than getting down to Catherine's last 113 assignment*

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Going back to my post last night about the concert, in retrospect it probably wasn't so bad. Things like that tend to come over me right after performances.

I went to Mass this afternoon at Notre Dame de Lourdes... much more formal than I'm used to either on campus or at my home parish. The hymns were all sung much more slowly and ponderously than I'd ever do, and it's sometimes weird to hear every word of the Gospel pronounced with such deliberate solemnity. But... when the organist and cantor struck up this plodding Gloria, I almost wished for the trumpets of last night and almost wanted to just blare out Bach's.

In other news, I fear that my stereo has been destroyed forever by whatever power surge or electrical failure hit ML a week or two ago. I was foolish enough to have it directly plugged into the wall. The outlet's fine as there's an LED on the stereo that's glowing, but I can't get it to turn on. It was a birthday/Christmas present my freshman year, so the warranty has long expired, and anyway the warranty specifically states that it won't cover acts of nature, including lightning damage.