Critical B

Bill Gates paid for the rights to seven physics lectures from 1964 so that anyone on Earth could watch them for free, and almost nobody has pressed play. They were given by Richard Feynman. In November 1964 Feynman gave Cornell's Messenger Lectures. He planned six lectures for a general audience, then added a seventh. The series was called The Character of Physical Law. The BBC filmed it. A year later he won the Nobel Prize. The films went around colleges for years, and then disappeared from circulation in the 1980s. Gates had watched them at Harvard. He later said he "fell in love" with them. He has reportedly told people that if he'd seen them earlier, he might have become a physicist instead of starting a software company. In 2009 he paid privately for the rights, from the Feynman estate, the BBC and Cornell. He never said how much. Microsoft Research put them online for free and called it Project Tuva, after the tiny republic in Central Asia that Feynman spent his last years trying to visit and never reached. When the BBC license ran out in 2021, Gates renewed it. Here's what's inside: > The Law of Gravitation > The Relation of Mathematics and Physics > The Great Conservation Principles > Symmetry in Physical Law > The Distinction of Past and Future > Probability and Uncertainty > Seeking New Laws The last one has the line every science teacher quotes. If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. Gates said his 10-year-old son could follow them. They're still free today on Caltech's Feynman Lectures website. One of the richest people alive paid to make the best physics teacher of the century free. The only thing left to pay is about seven hours. Which would you watch first: gravity, or why time only moves forward?