MathsNet interactive geometry: Feynman's lost lecture

Feynman's lost lecture
The motion of the planets around the Sun

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feynman (c) California Institute of Technology

Introduction
Richard P. Feynman, scientist, teacher, raconteur, and musician, assisted in the development of the atomic bomb, expanded the understanding of quantum electrodynamics, translated Mayan hieroglyphics, and cut to the heart of the Challenger disaster. But beyond all of that, Richard Feynman was a unique and multi-faceted individual, one of the most celebrated and revered scientists of modern times. On March 13th 1964, Feynman delivered a lecture to students at Caltech on "The motion of the planets around the sun". Not many bongo-playing surfer beatniks would have spent hours of their spare time proving Newton's law of elliptical planetary motion using only plane geometry, but Feynman's Lost Lecture shows that the great man did just that. These pages attempt to illustrate his diagrams (and also those included in David L. Goodstein and Judith R. Goodstein's published book on the lecture) and should be viewed alongside that text.

An ellipse is a conic section.

orbits of the planets

Feynman set out to prove that the orbits of planets around the sun are elliptic in shape and he tried to prove it by using only "elementary geometry".

References Feynman's Lost Lecture, David L. Goodstein and Judith R. Goodstein Visit Feynman online Interactive geometry from CabriJava Some graphics from Occurrence of the Conics