Talk:Feynman's Lost Lecture

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as stub, and the rating on other projects was brought up to Stub class. BetacommandBot 13:36, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Kepler's ″observations″
The sentence about Kepler's first observation being logically implied by his other two is ambiguous. I cannot understand these three observations in any other way than the three laws on planetary motion, but the third law in the form as it is presented today already talks about major axes, i.e., ellipses. Perhaps in Kepler's original formulation this is different, but in any case this sentence should be formulated according to what Feynman actually shows, which I cannot access, however. Seattle Jörg (talk) 09:07, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: 4A Wikipedia assignment
— Assignment last updated by Lzepeda12 (talk) 21:07, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

conic sections
As well as I remember the introduction of the book, and not explained here, is that showing elliptic orbits is a favorite calculus problem, and Newton would have done that. But at the time, calculus was new, and not known by many. Also at the time, conic sections were a popular study in math. And so Newton figured out how to show elliptical orbits using conic sections. Then Feynman rederived Newton's derivation for the lecture. And with only the (sparse) lecture notes, Goodstein rederived Feynman's rederivation. If someone has the book, maybe they can make that more obvious in the article. Gah4 (talk) 18:17, 19 June 2024 (UTC)