About the notes

These are notes Richard Feynman made in 1961-64 to plan and prepare lectures for Caltech's two-year introductory physics course. The originals are preserved by The Caltech Archives in their Feynman Papers collection (Group II, Section 4, folders 39.9, 40.3, 40.4 and 40.5). Photos of Feynman giving his undergraduate lectures (such as that above) show he almost always had a few pages of notes to which he referred occassionlly. The pages presented here (at least most) were among the ones he used.

The 611 pages are presented just as they are currently found in the Caltech Archives . While it is very clear there is a correspondence between the notes and the lectures in FLP, the notes also contain ideas that Feynman rejected, and other things, such as lesson plans, that are not properly part of the lectures.

Unfortunately, some notes seem to be missing. In particular, there is a dearth of notes on quantum mechanics; these may be hiding in some other part of the Feynman Papers collection. It is hoped that future research will uncover the missing notes so they can be added to this repository.