Project Tuva has a great series of lectures Feynman gave around that time http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#82One of the rare cases of "internet done right".
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#83Project Tuva has a great series of lectures Feynman gave around that time http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
Silverlight only. Too bad MS cares more about pushing their proprietary technology than sharing important historical / educational material.
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#84Don't forget the audio is out there too!
Is it actually possible to learn this through audio? With equations and so forth I would imagine it being rather hard. Do you have any experience with it?
Yes I have the audio. No, it is no substitute for the book. The audio is of the lectures. The books are based on the lectures. It's just nice to have the audio to go along so you can hear his personality.
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#85Great! This part kind of surprises me though: > However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. I know it doesn't actually mean anything in practice, but still, I'm shaking my head in disbelief that there's still people out there clinging to this mentality. Aside…
So we cannot not scrape this to see how many words are in each chapter, how the technical vocabulary changes over topics, or perform an analysis on connected keywords...
Well, If you're going on the definition of download as mentioned above you could write a javascript program to do it and run it on the webpages while they're still in browser.
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#86Is this worth reading for someone without a particular need to understand physics in depth? What I mean is if I take the time to read these will I learn anything useful to someone not pursuing a career in physics or related field?
I don't know about useful -- physics is not currently as useful to a programmer as, say, probability theory -- but I'd recommend volume 1 to anyone ready to follow it, just for the mind-stretching. Volume 2 is longer, harder, and less different in its approach to its main topic, electromagnetism. Volume 3 is short, unique, and doesn't depend too much on Volume 2 -- I was able to profit from it without mastering volume 2. (Nowadays there probably are better intros to quantum mechanics, though. I don't think there was any one really good intro when I studied it back in the 80s. The most enlightening were Feynman vol. 3, Dirac's Principles, and another whose authors I've forgotten.)
Added: There's only one other introductory physics text by a historically first-rank physicist, and that was Maxwell in the 19th century. (Maybe there were earlier ones, like Euler's books on mechanics, which I haven't read. Einstein's Relativity was a popularization like Feynman's QED or The Character of Physical Law rather than like the Feynman lectures. Newton's Principia has also been used as an intro text, which seems hilariously inappropriate.) The lectures are also unusually full of the this-is-how-a-physicist-thinks thing which is hard to pin down.
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#87Great! This part kind of surprises me though: > However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. I know it doesn't actually mean anything in practice, but still, I'm shaking my head in disbelief that there's still people out there clinging to this mentality. Aside…
Lawmakers redefined the meaning of download to "download and permanently store". They don't see "download and only hold in application cache for a limited time" as download.
Unless it's child porn, I think.
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it actually possible to learn this through audio? With equations and so forth I would imagine it being rather hard. Do you have any experience with it?
Yes I have the audio. No, it is no substitute for the book. The audio is of the lectures. The books are based on the lectures. It's just nice to have the audio to go along so you can hear his personality.
Yeah I could see how that would be beneficial. And I guess that it could work for repetition as well. Where did you get the audio?
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Books are clearly worse in virtually every context than one on one dialog with the author. This is not the case with fiction or poetry, where what is communicated is often precisely what cannot be communicated socially or even explicitly. The experiences of both writing and reading are often in a different realm altogether than those of speaking and listening face to face -- one is not a watered down version of the…
People can recite books just fine, let alone poetry. Granted, it's something of a lost skill, but one on one interactions are not limited to dialogs even if they may enhance exposition. So, you gain absolutely nothing by writing the spoken word down as a skilled orator can speak with a nuteral tone when desired but the written word can't add inflection.
Sometimes deliberate ambiguity is part of the art. (Also, on a more practical level, books are better at random access.)
Re: Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Feynman lectures certainly will teach you a lot, but I think it would be a fairly trying textbook for learning a lot of the material for the first time. Among other things, a very serious deficiency for self-education is a complete lack of problems to work (which just reflects that these really were lectures).
What would you recommend for self-education?
That's a tough question. One of the most appealing things about the Feynman lectures is the breadth and how self-contained it is. I don't think there are really good analogues for that. The closest thing I can think of is one of the monster first-year physics tomes like Halliday and Resnick. That will teach you much of the basics (large chunks of Vol. 1 and 2 of the Feynman lectures), has huge numbers of problems, but it is of course less fun. It is also probably comparably or more expensive.
Going much further than that gets tricky, because you will usually need more development in math in concert with the physics. The omnibus "engineering mathematics" type books will cover a lot of it but I don't really like them. Boas's Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences would be something I would look at. For more detailed looks at electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, I (and many others I know) really liked David Griffiths's textbooks. The Feynman lectures make an excellent supplement to these for the different perspective and interesting physical insights.