David L. Goodstein
David L. Goodstein is an American physicist and science historian who spent the majority of his career at the California Institute of Technology, where he served as Vice Provost and Professor of Physics and Applied Physics. A distinguished educator and researcher, Goodstein was for many years the scientific director of the Feynman Lectures Project and played a central role in preserving and disseminating the scientific legacy of his Caltech colleague Richard Feynman.
As a popular science author, Goodstein is best known for Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil (2004), a concise and authoritative examination of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels and the approaching limits of petroleum supply. Drawing on physics, geology, and economics, Goodstein argued with characteristic clarity that the era of cheap, abundant oil was drawing to a close and that the transition to alternative energy sources would be one of the defining challenges of the twenty-first century. The book received widespread praise for its accessibility and its willingness to address the problem with scientific honesty rather than political optimism.
Together with his wife Judith R. Goodstein, the Caltech archivist, he co-authored Feynman’s Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun (1996), which reconstructed and explained a remarkable lecture given by Richard Feynman that had been thought lost. The book reproduced the lecture and provided the mathematical context needed to appreciate Feynman’s elegant geometric proof of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, making it accessible to readers with a modest mathematical background.
Goodstein also created the video lecture series The Mechanical Universe, an influential educational television series that brought college-level physics to television audiences. His career embodies a commitment to physics education at every level, from the introductory classroom to the pages of popular science, and his work on energy policy reflects the responsibility he felt as a scientist to engage with the most consequential questions of the age.