The Feynman Lectures on Physics

"Well, this was the book containing the lecture series Feynman gave as a university professor. The reason I chose it is that I think that he is one of the most intelligent people to live in the 20th century. Yet at the same time, surprisingly, he is an amazingly good teacher. This is quite an unusual combination as I have learnt here [in Cambridge] – people can be so intelligent that they have trouble seeing how other people can’t understand something. I’m not one of those people because the students have trouble with the same things I struggled with. Feynman’s mix of being a bona fide scary genius, and yet still being able to convey just about anything, is unique. The area Feynman was really involved in was quantum physics. At the time he was writing there was this sudden realisation that the very small scale was going to have to be married up with the huge scale (what we thought we knew already). He was writing at that interesting stage; physicists had all this unrelated stuff, and they had to put it all together. No. In fact, it is one of the good things about science that actually you don’t often get to resolve things because what you have found out is only that things are more complicated than you thought. Various bits of my subject, biology, are going through this phase, for example genetics. We have sequenced the human genome at an individual level. The next stage is piecing together genomes and populations which is a vast undertaking. Doing science is a bit like writing a book; you are kind of bored of by it halfway through writing it, because you know what’s going to happen. It’s the next book you are always thinking about. This, I think, is why scientists are never content, because they are always trying to think five years into the future."