Bill Gates paid for the rights to seven #physics lectures recorded in 1964 so that anyone, anywhere in the world, could watch them for free. More than half a century later, they remain remarkably underappreciated.
The lecturer was Richard Feynman.
In November 1964, #richardfeynman delivered Cornell University’s Messenger Lectures, originally planned as a six-part series for a general audience. He eventually added a seventh lecture. The series was titled * The Character of Physical Law*, and the BBC filmed it.
A year later, Feynman would receive the #NobelPrize in Physics.
For years, the films circulated among universities before gradually disappearing from public circulation in the 1980s.
Bill Gates had watched the lectures while studying at Harvard. He later said he had fallen in love with them, even suggesting that if he had encountered Feynman’s teaching earlier, he might have pursued physics instead of building a software company.
In 2009, #BillGates personally funded the acquisition of the rights from the Feynman estate, the BBC, and Cornell University. The amount was never disclosed.
Microsoft Research then made the lectures freely available online through Project Tuva, named after the small republic in Central Asia that Feynman had spent years hoping to visit but never reached.
When the BBC licensing agreement expired in 2021, Gates renewed it.
And what exactly do those seven lectures explore?
1. The Law of Gravitation 2. The Relation of Mathematics and Physics 3. The Great Conservation Principles 4. Symmetry in Physical Law 5. The Distinction of Past and Future 6. Probability and Uncertainty 7. Seeking New Laws.
The final lecture contains one of the most enduring principles in science: if a theory disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. No matter how elegant the mathematics, how compelling the argument, or how authoritative its proponent, nature gets the final say.
Gates once remarked that even his 10-year-old son could follow these lectures.
That’s part of Feynman’s extraordinary gift as a teacher: making profound ideas accessible without making the underlying science simplistic.
The lectures are still available for free through Caltech’s Feynman Lectures website.
Think about that for a moment. One of the world’s wealthiest technology entrepreneurs invested in making the teachings of one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century freely accessible to everyone.
No tuition. No subscription. No paywall.
Just seven lectures and roughly seven hours of your time.
If you haven’t watched them, perhaps it’s time.
Would you start with gravity, or with the fascinating question of why the distinction between past and future exists?
In 1963 Richard Feynman was invited to give the 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, an annual tradition since 1924, when Hiram Messenger gifted Cornell with “a fund to provide a course of lectures on the Evolution of Civilization for the special purpose of raising the moral standard of our political, business, and social life”, to be “delivered by the ablest non-resident lecturer or lecturers obtainable”
Feynman had been a physics professor at Cornell from 1945 to 1950, during which time he did the work for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1965. While at Cornell Feynman became well-known in the physics community for his innovations in quantum electrodynamics and idosyncratic style. He was at Caltech in 1963, when he was invited to become the 41st Messenger Lecturer1, by which time he had become known to a much wider audience through his recently published book, Volume I of The Feynman Lectures on Physics.2
According to the Cornell Faculty Website, “A Messenger Lecturer typically gives three lectures/presentations over the course of a one-week visit. At least one of these must be a lecture that is suitable for a general audience.”3 Feynman, however, chose to give a series of six lectures, all for a general audience, which he titled The Character of Physical Law.4 He had plenty of material to draw from his recently completed introductory physics course, the basis of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. For this reason one finds many similarities, parallels, and even identical parts in the lectures of The Character of Physical Law and several of the lectures in The Feynman Lectures on Physics.