Richard Feynman Talks Physics with Fred Hoyle in Take the World From Another Point of View, 1973

The famous Amer­i­can physi­cist Richard Feyn­man used to take hol­i­days in Eng­land. His third wife, Gweneth Howarth, was a native of West York­shire, so every year the Feyn­man fam­i­ly would vis­it her home­town of Rip­pon­den or the near­by ham­let of Mill Bank.

In 1973 York­shire pub­lic tele­vi­sion made a short film of the Nobel lau­re­ate while he was there. The result­ing film, Take the World From Anoth­er Point of View, was broad­cast in Amer­i­ca as part of the PBS Nova series. The doc­u­men­tary fea­tures a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view, but what sets it apart from oth­er films on Feyn­man is the inclu­sion of a live­ly con­ver­sa­tion he had with the emi­nent British astro­physi­cist Fred Hoyle.

A native York­shire­man, Hoyle did ground­break­ing the­o­ret­i­cal work on the syn­the­sis of ele­ments in stars and was a lead­ing pro­po­nent of the Steady State the­o­ry of cos­mol­o­gy. In the film, the British astro­physi­cist and the Amer­i­can par­ti­cle physi­cist walk down to the local pub, Rip­pon­den’s his­toric Old Bridge Inn, for a live­ly con­ver­sa­tion on physics and the nature of sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery. You can read along with a tran­script of the film at the Cal­tech Web site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Richard Feyn­man Presents Quan­tum Elec­tro­dy­nam­ics for the Non­Sci­en­tist

‘The Char­ac­ter of Phys­i­cal Law’: Richard Feyn­man’s Leg­endary Lec­ture Series at Cor­nell, 1964

Richard Feyn­man Enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly Explains How to Think Like a Physi­cist in His Series Fun to Imag­ine (1983)