Abstract
Between 1949 and 1966, the American physicist Richard Feynman came to Brazil a few itimes. He did research and interacted with local physicists, gave courses and lectures and participated in the Rio carnival. Twice, in 1952 and 1963, he lectured on physics teaching. His observations and insights on this teaching gained notoriety as they were later revealed in one of his world-wide books: R. P. Feynman, "You're joking, Mr. Feynman!" In the book he describes situations of his interaction with Brazilian students, which illustrate his criticism of book-based teaching, based on memorization and without the investigative and critical dimension. The objective of this work is to analyze Feynman's two lectures on physics teaching in Brazil, to evaluate the possible local influence of his observations, criticisms and suggestions, and to seek retrospectively some preliminary comparisons on the current situation of teaching physics in Brazil with the considerations he made more than five decades ago. We shall reproduce, in the end, the translation of Feynman's second lecture, "The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America" (1963).
Keywords:
Richard Feynman; physics teaching; history of physics in Brazil