"When I was vice chair of the faculty, the chair... was Robbie Vogt... As soon as he stepped down... and I became chair of the faculty, he became chair of the PMA division, and he called me into his office... in 1979. We had been teaching from the Feynman physics books... using them as textbooks ever since Feynman had given the lectures, from '62 to '64. ...[T]hey had just gotten too hard. It was great for the teachers; I loved teaching from his books. But for the students—if you didn’t already know physics, trying to learn physics from those books... Seeing physics with fresh eyes all over again, it’s wonderful—that’s why every scientist in the world owns a set of these books... [b]ut to learn it for the first time from those books is just impossible. You basically need to know physics, in order to appreciate them."
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David Goodstein
(April 5, 1939 – April 10, 2024) was an American physicist and served as professor of physics and as Vice-provost at the . He wrote several books, including ' (1996). In the 1980s he was the director and host of ', an educational television series on physics that was adapted for high school use and translated into many other languages. The series garnered more than a dozen prestigious awards, including the 1987 Japan Prize for television.
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