# What was Feynman's “much better way of presenting the electrodynamics” — which did **not** appear in the Feynman lectures?

Does anyone know what Feynman was referring to in this interview which appears at the beginning of The Feynman Tips on Physics? Note that he is referring to something that did not appear in the Feynman lectures.

I didn't like to do the second year, because I didn't think I had great ideas about how to present the second year. I felt that I didn't have a good idea on how to do lectures on electrodynamics. But, you see, in these challenges that had existed before about lectures, they had challenged me to explain relativity, challenged me to explain quantum mechanics, challenged me to explain the relation of mathematics to physics, the conservation of energy. I answered every challenge. But there was one challenge which nobody asked, which I had set myself, because I didn't know how to do it. I've never succeeded yet. Now I think I know how to do it. I haven't done it, but I'll do it someday. And that is this: How would you explain Maxwell's equations? How would you explain the laws of electricity and magnetism to a layman, almost a layman, a very intelligent person, in an hour lecture? How do you do it? I've never solved it. Okay, so give me two hours of lecture. But it should be done in an hour of lecture, somehow -- or two hours.

Anyhow I've now cooked up a much better way of presenting the electrodynamics, a much more original and much more powerful way than is in the book. But at that time I had no new way, and I complained that I had nothing extra to contribute for myself. But they said, "Do it anyway," and they talked me into it, so I did.

Did this approach to teaching electrodynamics appear in any of his later writing?

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I don't know exactly what he is referring to, but one possibility is the QFT way to do it (which for Feynman was essentially a warm up exercise on the way to deriving GR from similar principles). Basically the unique theory of a Lorentz Invariant, charge=0 massless spin 1 particle at low energies is Maxwell's equations. Feynman's way of getting there in his Lectures on Gravitation is to start from conservation of charge and to say that photons couple to matter as $A_\mu J^\mu$ and then by looking at various scattering amplitudes you can end up at the Maxwell Lagrangian. –  Andrew Feb 26 at 10:58
"which for Feynman was essentially a warm up exercise on the way to deriving GR from similar principles" Can you provide some reference for this? Very curious to hear about it. –  Danu Feb 26 at 11:37
may be he is talking about Feynman diagrams –  Hubble07 Feb 26 at 12:42