Einstein is the alpha and the omega of modern physics in pop culture. He's a meme and a classroom nickname - more symbol than man. But there are other physicists around who play their own roles.

Carl Sagan is the field's wandering bard. His PBS series Cosmos explored the wide universe and inspired wonder in millions. It put many millions more to sleep under the supervision of substitute science teachers.

Stephen Hawking is a modern day oracle at Delphi. Cryptic and strange, he makes wild claims about black holes and multiple universes, yet still gets 10 million people to buy a book with the most boring title ever published.

If there's one post-Einstein physicist who can claim to be the realm's philosopher-king, however, it's Richard Feynman. Feynman worked out of the legendary CalTech physics department for decades. He made important contributions to a list of subfields with names I'll never understand, and won a Nobel Prize in 1965 for his theory of quantum electrodynamics.

His work made him a physicist's physicist, but Feynman also had cultural appeal as a sage figure. A young professor who worked down the hall from him towards the end of Feynman's career wrote a book about it called Feynman's Rainbow with the subtitle "A Search for Beauty in Physics and Life."

Titanic figures like Feynman don't teach physics to undergraduates, especially in the three or four years before they win a Nobel prize. But Feynman did.

In 1961, every member of the freshman class began a two-year Intro to Physics course with Richard Feynman. He would only teach the course once, and everyone knew it would be historic. The class was a response to flagging undergraduate interest in physics, despite the top-end theorists on the CalTech staff. As Feynman put it in his preface:

"[The students] have heard a lot about how interesting and exciting physics is---the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and other modern ideas. By the end of two years of our previous course, many would be very discouraged because there were really very few grand, new, modern ideas presented to them."

With the injection of Feynman's genius and creativity, the syllabus was a new way to understand what an introductory course could be. But at the end of this two year "experiment," Feynman thought he'd failed. "I don't think I did very well by the students." Fortunately, pretty much everybody else disagreed. The lectures were collected and turned into a 3 volume series called The Feynman Lectures on Physics as well as a series of audio recordings. They've been obsessed over by physics students and professors for 50 years. Feynman himself corrected some errors in the first two volumes over the years, but his early death in 1988 and the draw of getting back to solving the toughest theoretical physics problems in the world kept him from doing a complete revision.

That revision has now been done by some of his collaborators and successors. The first volume of those lectures is available in full at CalTech's website for the first time. It has a daunting table of contents, but the information is laid out beautifully, with a fancy new way to transcribe Feynman's diagrams and equations. And if you're not enthusiastic enough to cover the whole volume, I bet you'll learn more by reading the 3-paragraph intros to each section than you would in a year of a normal intro to physics course.

You can find this amazing resource here: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html