User talk:Codelieb

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Happy Editing. --Blainster 15:58, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Feynman's Tips on Physics
Thanks for correcting the record. I see that the book does list you as co-author. I am still a little unclear exactly what your input to the project was. "Editor" is a fairly ambiguous term. I think to most people, the editor is the one responsible for selecting, arranging, and in some cases copyediting material written by someone else into publishable form, rather than the business function of publisher's liason to the author. Perhaps for an author whose text is transcribed from an audio recording, the work required qualifies the transcriber as co-author rather than editor. Is this the situation for your book? --Blainster 16:22, 9 March 2006 (UTC)


 * My role in the project that created The Definitive Edition of "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" (FLP-DE) and "Feynman's Tips on Physics" (Tips) is described in Kip Thorne's preface to FLP-DE and in my preface to Tips: I conceived of the project with Ralph Leighton, after identifying about 170 errors in the then-current edition of FLP and noting in Feynman's preface that four of his lectures never made it into the books. Ralph found and secured the four lectures, and transcribed the audiotapes, while I did most of the editing and all of the illustration and layout (in Tips).


 * If you ever listen to tapes of Feynman's lectures and compare them to the corresponding chapters of FLP, you will find good reason why Robert Leighton and Matthew Sands are co-authors (not editors) of FLP; the source material had to be greatly refined, clarified, illustrated, and sometimes elaborated, and so (though most people do not realize it) there is a lot of Leighton and Sands mixed up with Feynman in FLP.


 * According to the American Heritage Dictionary the principal meaning of the word "author" is "the original writer of a literary work," while the secondary meaning is "the beginner, originator, or creator of anything." In the case of FLP, Feynman gave the lectures, but he didn't do any of the actual writing or illustrating (though he did proofread), nor did he originate the idea of teaching the introductory physics course at Caltech that led to the creation of FLP (Matthew Sands did, as documented in his memoir in Tips). Michael A. Gottlieb


 * Thanks for taking the time to respond. I haven't read FLP, except for thumbing through it at the bookstore, but I have listened to the Six Easy Pieces discs, and enjoyed those lectures, read Gleick's book, also the great Surely You're Joking, and What Do You Care?.  Have fun working on Wikipedia.  There is lots to do.  The community has lots of dedicated workers, but like anywhere else, you will run into some who have difficulty working with others, and cooperation is a required skill here. --Blainster 04:27, 14 March 2006 (UTC)