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Richard Feynman is an American physicist who is famous in a number of dimensions. To scientists, he is a giant of 20th-century physics and a pioneer of quantum electrodynamics (QED). To the public, he is a refreshing character that went against the typical stereotype of physicists. To physics students, he was an exceptionally excellent teacher, both for his charisma and his uncanny ability to make complicated topics feel natural and intuitive. Although many of the lectures he gave at Caltech are immortalized in his three-volume series “The Feynman Lectures on Physics.” Unfortunately, not all of the lectures he gave made it to this series. In particular, a guest lecture given on March 13, 1964, entitled “The Motion of Planets around the Sun” was lost because it was somehow buried in the office of one of Feynman’s colleagues. The lecture notes were later found and restored by Caltech physicist David L. Goodstein and his wife, who worked at Caltech as an archivist. Eventually, it was published in a book titled “Feynman’s Lost Lecture,” which contains both the lecture itself and the surrounding stories in a beautiful way. The lecture mainly tries to answer the question “Why are orbits elliptic?” There is an analytical solution involving pedantic mathematical formulas, but Feynman did something special by providing a very elementary approach to answering the question. It would be a nice supplement for some students taking Physics I course since Physics I never really answers the cause of the elliptic orbits of planets.

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