The Feynman Lectures on Physics (2013)

Thank you.

I had tried to find this before and it was like Microsoft were making it for Windows users only.

I'm not sure how many 'layman' are comfortable with Linear Algebra and Calculus ;).

Give it a shot; there's a fair number of non-mathy digressions that are worth reading, and you sound like you have the background to handle the mathier parts.

No, definitely not. Try to find some book in the topic that you are interested in. If it is electromagnetism, go for the black book with four equations printed. If it is quantum mechanics, I like the Sakurai book.

Parts are and parts definitely aren't. I have a four year physics degree and found the treatment of certain sections very challenging. I would not recommend it as an introductory text

Yes, this series is fantastic. It offers a number of side-discussions that should also prove useful if you decide to go on to read more specialized physics material (e.g. to follow a more "traditional" academic physics curriculum).

These books were created from Feynman's lectures to freshman and sophomore Caltech students. I have not looked at the books in detail, but I think that a dedicated reader who is comfortable with calculus should be able to understand them.

Definitely. But there aren't any problems and problem-solving is essential to learning physics so you need to have other textbooks at hand as well.

Yes, if you supplement it with problems -- you'll have to find them elsewhere or make some up yourself. (There's a companion book of exercises recently published, not on the website, which I haven't read.)

Of course different books help most for different people. This one's not the best if you want to pass a course and put it behind you. I think it's very much worth checking out if you want to be challenged and inspired to tackle problems for yourself and perhaps pick up a bit of how Feynman thought. There are very few other introductory texts by physicists of his stature: Matter and Motion by Maxwell, and, well, anything else? (Not counting popularizations; it's a fuzzy distinction, but these are securely on the textbook side.)

As a very first physics textbook I really liked Halliday's. But I did not read very extensively back then, the focus was really on understanding and solving problems.

No, that was the canonical order of lectures long before Feynman started teaching.

Actually, I think Feynman's influence on introductory physics teaching is much smaller than it is often stated. More "standard" courses that put a higher emphasis on how to actually carry out computations are more successful first physics courses. Feynman's lecture notes are an illuminating read to gain a broader perspective when one has already learnt how to "do" physics. IIRC in the preface Feynman himself actually expresses his disappointment with how well his students actually managed to learn from his teaching.

Feynman as a researcher was a master at presenting his (innovative and important) results in insightful ways, such that they appear almost obviously plausible from these alternative angles. But he did that after powering through insanely hard, long calculations to really obtain these results. Those are the most important part of the work.

Based on the description of "Six Easy Pieces", it appears to be a book targeted specifically at a lay audience, to popularize physics. The Feynman Lectures on Physics are basically a collection of lecture notes for a series of courses he taught at CalTech to physics majors, a decidedly not-lay audience.

Six Easy Pieces corresponds to these chapters in The Feynman Lectures on Physics:

  Chapter 1, Atoms in Motion
  Chapter 2, Basic Physics
  Chapter 3, Relation of Physics to Other Sciences
  Chapter 4, Conservation of Energy
  Chapter 7, Theory of Gravitation
  Chapter 37, Quantum Behavior

The editing differences are probably slight. Six Easy Pieces first came out in 1994 and the question would be whether a particular edition contains the 2006 definitive edition corrections.

I believe it's just 6 of the lectures, selected for their accessibility to a general audience (i.e., lack of mathyness).

There are no videos of the lectures of the material the book is based on. The videos Gates put up are the Messenger Lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell.