41–50 of 117 posts
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I suppose you must mean that most people do not get an immediate material benefit out of art. But there is so much more in life than that.
I'm in the middle of reading "Surely you're joking, Mr. Fenyman!", and so far, it is a FANTASTIC read. He has so many interesting stories about fiddling with stuff as a kid, working on the manhattan project, picking locks, interactions with Oppenheimer, Einstein, etc. Even if you aren't at all interested in physics, math, or anything science related, I would still recommend this book. That said, I now have a lot more…
I found it interesting how radically different his teaching premise is from the current U.S. public school approach. From the preface: I thought to address them to the most intelligent in the class and to make sure, if possible, that even the most intelligent student was unable to completely encompass everything that was in the lectures.
If I recall the introduction correctly, the lectures were kindof a failed pedagogical experiment because of this - it worked well for the best students, but the mediocre/worse students did a fair amount worse than in previous years. I don't think Caltech continued to teach the first two years in the Feynman style after this. But regardless, the lecture series is a wonderful overview on the actual physics, even if it…
They're not a singular reference, but they're really good. His rachet and pawl lecture is timeless.
http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Princeton-Science-Library/...
Out of all his writings, this is the one that has always stuck with me.
Feynman long held that one does not understand something if one cannot explain it to someone who is not deeply steeped in the subject already. I regard this lecture as probably the culmination of that philosophy for Feynman. Anybody with a deep mathematical background will be stunned on reading this book to realize that, oh, he was actually just talking about complex numbers and the path integral formulation all along.
Taken from one of those reviews, I don't need to say much more than this: "He does close to the impossible by explaining the rudimentary ideas of Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) in a manner that is reasonably accessible to those with some physics background"
Update: Most of the questions center on cost. I've answered in more detail below, but the short version is simple: no off-the-shelf converter was remotely sufficient for our needs, so we had to write lots of custom software, and writing custom software is hard.
Are the audio files available as well? I know there's the Silverlight version, but looking for audio I can play while I drive.
[1] https://mega.co.nz/#!eYJ2SaZY!PuMb5BI4j4XrEX8anIZrPmEMbHZ7cQ...