The Feynman Lectures on Physics Now Completely Online (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Feynman Lectures on Physics Now Completely Online (2014)

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113 pointssynthmeat12 comments

I love the Feynman lectures! But sadly, they are not searchable with google [1], and I don't see a search box on the site. There is a table of contents, but no index. Is that a deliberate omission to create more value for buyers of a digital edition?

[1] http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/robots.txt

The Feynman lectures are also available on the Internet archive:

https://archive.org/details/TheFeynmanLecturesOnPhysicsVolum...

You can download them in several formats, including PDF and even pure ASCII.

I wonder about the provenance of those files. Looks like user eknikko is just uploading texts to the Internet Archive without any cooperation from the authors/publishers. His or her channel[1] includes copies of K&R, Stroustrup's C++ book, and Intro to Algorithms by Cormen et al, among other things.

I know the Archive doesn't have the strictest policy on copyright (tons of old commercials, magazine scans, and other ephemera that most people see as a grey area is available), but I doubt even their views are lax enough to look at this as kosher.

1. https://archive.org/details/@eknikko

And it's good for the world that this is the case.

While the original term of 14 years may have struck a good balance between motivating creators and moving their creations into the public domain, copyright laws have gone mad in the past century.

Algorithms by Cormen 3rd edition is from 2009

Interestingly, two of the three private copyright acts in America prior to the Copyright Act of 1790 I was referring to were for 7 years.

I'm sure if you try, you can find a more recent book. This is just some more food for thought. What length of time do you believe strikes the optimal balance between incentivizing creation and adding to the public domain?

The author's lifetime, especially for written works like novels or textbooks.

Well, the original purpose of copyright was to allow creators to earn enough from their works that they could create more. (Since then I personally feel that it has turned into a form of money-grabbing.)

The argument can hardly be made that this applies to Feynman. And in this case -- especially with such a treasure trove of information -- I cannot really see much of a purpose in it not being free to distribute.

I think these have been on-line for a number of years now. Bill Gates first purchased them and created Project Tuva. http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/

Cool stuff. Is there "Feynman Lectures" (not necessarily by Feynman) for math or CS?

The Feynman Lectures on Computation. Discussed at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17274.Feynman_Lectures_On..., etc.

There's The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth [1] but it's really dense, and I doubt most people have actually read through it to it's entirety.

For math there's The Princeton Companion to Mathematics [2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Programming-Volumes-1-4A-Boxe...

[2] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350.html

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