John Preskill

And those were captured by some now-famous books called the Feynman Lectures on Physics.

They're three big red books.

Feynman worked very hard on that.

He thought very deeply about how to organize the material.

And they're rather extraordinary.

I think I didn't really appreciate them until I was a more senior physicist.

When he gave a talk or a lecture, he was kind of mesmerizing and really grabbed your attention.

I have the privilege of calling your attention today to what is probably one of the most far-reaching generalizations of the human mind.

And while he spoke, things would seem extraordinarily clear and obvious, and many people had the experience that then afterward, when you tried to reconstruct the arguments, you'd find it very difficult.

Somehow he made it seem easy, but there were nuances that he made seem natural when he spoke of them, but then when you tried to follow the path again, were actually very subtle.

And what is this law of gravitation?

It is that every object in the universe attracts every other with a force proportional to the mass of each and varying inversely as the square of the distance between them.

If you like mathematics, you can write that same thing as an equation.

The blackboard choreography would be very carefully thought out.

They would end exactly on time.

They had been prepared with great care, so he really put everything into it.

Feynman, I came in and there were about, I don't know, 16 or 20 students all wearing shorts and trainers with their feet up on the tables and stuff.

And none of them were taking any notes.

Feynman was lecturing and I couldn't, of course, understand anything.

It was really high level quantum physics.