Along these lines, one of the early popular science works is "Letters to a German Princess", which compiles Euler's letters on Natural Philosophy (which is mostly what we today call science and maths) which he was commissioned to write as part of her education. Many were keen to educate their daughters as well as royalty, so the book version sold well. It is, of course, very out of date in terms of the science.
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
111–120 of 156 posts
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#112I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles ap…
Self study is the best study. Out of all the bloatedness of modern education, one thing that doesnt bother me is the high cost of textbooks. High quality books and a habit of studying yourself enables you to learn high skill disciplines on the cheap. For me, I am currently slogging through Lazlo Lovasz's combinatorics book and another one on Monte Carlo method. Dont know why but its just a good way to pass the time w…
A previous comment of mine is relevant here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41567665
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a whole chapter about it, and it's not mysogonic. He addressed the problem of females who simply eat and drink for free EXPLOITING stupid dudes as the default mode of partying. That's why he is hostile to them with I highly recommend reading it. It's not worse than calling someone who exploits drunk women as 'dickhead'. Lastly the word 'bitch' used here is an important part of the particular story where he u…
I have read the whole chapter, and my criticism is not based on taking a single quote out of context. Your framing reduces women in that environment to a single stereotype ("girls exploiting men for drinks"), and the suggested response is to adopt deliberate hostility and disrespect as a strategy; it is generalizing an entire group and justifying contempt toward them. The "lesson" explicitly encourages treating inter…
Not buying drinks for strangers is NOT bad advice.
Best of all: he is right. Just ask women or people who party a lot :)
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Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#114"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
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Note that this was before the times of no fault divorce.
At that time it was common to allege extreme behavior (often mutually agreed upon), to Trump up the charges just to make the divorce go through.
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's be clear about this video; the "sham legacy" is the commercialization/exploitation of Feynman's legacy after he died. Feynman was not a charlatan. Collier doesn't claim he is. She talks about the very real contributions he made. Her criticism is largely about the way people scraped together any scrap of paper he had jotted down a note on and turned it into a thin book, "Feynman on XYZ topic". But yes, he does c…
It should be knee-jerk dismissed because the submission topic is the textbooks, not the man, and it's derailed discussion into a tangent about his personal shortcomings. Not exactly in the spirit of intellectual curiosity HN tries to foster.
Well said !
These sort of people are what is pejoratively called "attention whores" with nothing worthwhile to contribute on the topic under discussion. Hence they always come up with provocative phrases/statements simply to make themselves feel relevant.
Downvote and Flag these sorts of comments into oblivion; don't engage with them.
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#116"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
So true. How this guy captures the imagination of the English speaking world is astonishing. Sommerfeld Landau Schwinger They mop the floor with Feynman but no one remembers them. Landau, meanwhile had the most comprehensive set of physics book, Sommerfeld the most accessible deep set of physics books. Meanwhile "the Feynman Lectures" burry important details that will derail a train as soon as you leave the safe spac…
I think Feynman's popularity lie with his deep understanding of phenomena and ability to explain them to others - "If you can't explain it to a six-year old, you don't understand it yourself"
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#117It is very interesting to see completely different impressions of Feynman from comments here. As a physicist, I first got introduced to Feynman from his popular QED book as a freshman in college. Over the years, I came to admire his contributions and way of thinking but could also see the cult of personality that has formed.
Feynman is definitely not like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kaku. He was a very creative and technically sophisticated physicist. All his popular books are based on lectures he wrote and gave but they were mostly "side projects" e.g. computation, lectures on gravitation, six easy pieces etc.
To get a better sense of his work, I would highly recommend:
- The Beat of a Different Drum by Jagdish Mehra
- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick
- Selected Papers - https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4270 (expensive and technical)
- QED and the men who made it by Schweber
There are also many historical physicists who are surprisingly unknown outside the field - Schwinger, Tomonaga, Landau, Sidney Coleman, Murray Gell-mann, Nambu, Steven Weinberg, Ken Wilson, Curtis Callan etc. I just randomly picked a few names before the 90s but these are all scientific giants. For example, Schwinger's papers are notoriously hard to read but his books are great after a first course. Sidney Coleman gave beautiful lectures on QFT. Landau is extremely famous for his 9 books with Lifshitz. It definitely is very surprising that Feynman has such an outsized share of interest. Maybe because he was a gregarious outgoing character?
Another interesting aspect is how a person is often viewed as an authority or even a genius because their work introduces an audience to the subject. Feynman with his lectures. To a far lesser extent (in my opinion), one sees this with Andrej Karpathy and Jeremy Howard. This is not to take away from their wonderful teaching work. I know how hard it is to distill material and convey it. But, there's a whole web of contributions that leads to a subject maturing enough to be taught clearly.
As I get older, I find it less useful to assign labels (names) to discoveries and contributions. As Feynman himself said in a lecture after drawing a Feynman diagram, "this is THE diagram" (and not the Feynman diagram).
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#118"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
So true. How this guy captures the imagination of the English speaking world is astonishing. Sommerfeld Landau Schwinger They mop the floor with Feynman but no one remembers them. Landau, meanwhile had the most comprehensive set of physics book, Sommerfeld the most accessible deep set of physics books. Meanwhile "the Feynman Lectures" burry important details that will derail a train as soon as you leave the safe spac…
> Sommerfeld Landau Schwinger
I am the OP who posted this with an idea of eliciting other notable works on Physics and comparing them to Feynman Lectures. I do not want this to be derailed into talking about the man.
While i know of Landau & Lifshitz, i have not read Arnold Sommerfeld's nor Julian Schwinger's works.
I sincerely suggest that you post a top-level comment in this thread with your takes on Feynman vs. Other authors works that you mention. This would be of great help to everybody interested in Physics and Science.
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting, he also talks about quantum computing (a first?): p. 191, "We now go on to consider how such a computer can also be built using the laws of quantum mechanics. We are going to write a Hamiltonian, for a system of interacting parts, which will behave in the same way as a large system in serving as a universal computer." p. 196: "In general, in quantum mechanics, the outgoing state at time t is eⁱᴴᵗ Ψᵢₙ whe…
Feynman is indeed often quoted among the first people to propose the idea of a quantum computer! This talk he gave in ‘81 is among the earliest discussion of why a quantum universe requires a quantum computer to be simulated [1]: > Can a quantum system be probabilisticaUy simulated by a classical (probabilistic, I'd assume) universal computer? In other words, a computer which will give the same probabilities as the q…
The quote is not suggesting a quantum computer can’t be simulated classically, it can in fact, just slowly, by keeping track of the quantum state where n qubits is 2^n complex amplitudes.
It relates more to the Bell results, that there doesn’t exist a hidden variable system that’s equivalent to QM.
Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)
#120It is very interesting to see completely different impressions of Feynman from comments here. As a physicist, I first got introduced to Feynman from his popular QED book as a freshman in college. Over the years, I came to admire his contributions and way of thinking but could also see the cult of personality that has formed. Feynman is definitely not like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kaku. He was a very creative and techni…
Feynman had the vanishingly rare combination of being at world-shaking (literally) historical events like the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test that ordinary people can relate to¹, actual scientific contribution enough to merit a Nobel Prize in Physics, and being an engaging storyteller and educator. I don't think it's all that surprising that his recognizability very high.
¹ Ordinary people can relate to a giant industrial project and a huge boom. They cannot relate to some person sitting in a room writing arcane symbols and muttering to themselves until one day they yell "Heureka! Ich hab es gefunden!" or whatever the proper German is and rush off to publish a paper.