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The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

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Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

#41

Post by rramadass »

mmooss wrote: post #9

What has changed in 60 years, I wonder? If you are teaching this material, what do you have to update and/or contextualize?

This is a good question and my initial thought would be Atomic Physics and Cosmology.

A book like Modern Atomic Physics by Vasant Natarajan (2015) would be a good place to look - https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Atomic-Physics/Natarajan/p/...

The recent book (free) Atomic Physics for Everyone: An Introduction to Atomic Physics, Quantum Mechanics, and Precision Spectroscopy with No College-Level Prerequisites (2025) should also be good for an initial understanding of atomic physics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46961595

Also Wikipedia has a helpful Timeline of fundamental physics discoveries page to browse - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_fundamental_physic...

Finally, asking Google something like "what is new in physics since feynman lectures", Gemini gave me a helpful summary in its "AI Overview" which you can also try out.

Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

#43

Post by shanemhansen »

delichon wrote: post #11

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belc…

I've thought of this quote a bunch and I came up with my own addon.

"Some people think that the magic of something wondrous is diminished when it's understood. I feel bad for those people." -- Shanemhansen

Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

#45

Post by mhh__ »

colmmacc wrote: post #3

Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.

The Feynman lectures are obviously brilliant but think the computation lectures are probably a better display of Feynman's brilliance. It's quite stunning how up to date they are.

Although that being said the rough outline of a field is usually worked out almost immediately after a consensus forms that it's "real" so to speak.

Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

#46

Post by mananaysiempre »

kmaitreys wrote: post #40
mananaysiempre wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A footnote for those of the millenial or more recent persuasion: we take the full “vastness of the heavens” as given, as we’ve seen it described pretty confidently all the way back to the science books of our childhood. But cosmology, and frankly the entire field of astrophysics, is strikingly young. The idea that nebulae are in fact whole independent collections of stars, and that the observable universe is large en…

I feel uncomfortable labelling nebulae as collection of stars. The more appropriate term is stellar nursery if you want to allude to their role in star formation. They themselves are just clouds of gas and dust where protostars have begun to form. Stellar clusters are what you would call a collection of stars. Also on the note of cosmology and astrophysics being strikingly young fields, I think that's fair statement…

Sorry, yes, there’s a terminological disconnect here: M31, say, is the “Andromeda Galaxy” to us, but the “Andromeda Nebula” to Hubble’s contemporaries circa 1920. The recognition that at least some of the cloudy (nebulous, literally) stuff in the sky is galaxies (and that the universe fits more than one) was the very point of the fight I mentioned. The world before it was thought to be drastically smaller in a way that I find difficult to think about.

Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

#47

Post by wellf »

melling wrote: post #35
CamperBob2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just wears thin after a while. Nobody studies Feynman to learn social skills or sexual ethics. If they did, these types of complaints would certainly be relevant... but they don't, and they aren't.

People also don’t think he’s one of the greatest physicists ever. As he said, he was just an ordinary person who worked very hard.

Everyone thinks they are ordinary. If you have 160 IQ that just feels ordinary. You can only really measure ordinary in terms of achievement.

The 100 IQ person that works that hard doesn't invent that much physics. They might get rich, change the world etc.

Re: The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

#50

Post by lkey »

chadcmulligan wrote: post #25
traes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand not watching a 3 hour video before leaving a comment, but this is a disrespectful reaction to a very well thought out video by a professional physicist giving a nuanced opinion about Feynman's legacy. She acknowledges many times in the video that Feynman was a great physicist who deserved his Nobel prize. The central topic of the video is dissecting his public image and the many books published under his…

misogynistic behaviors were cultural at the time, I agree they're abhorrent but people are embedded in their culture. The same is said of Hitchcock, (as an example) and his behaviour was unacceptable by todays standards. We've come some way from that but still a way to go. From the about the authors in the OP's link "Feynman was a remarkably effective educator. Of all his numerous awards, he was especially proud of t…

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