The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III | Hacker News Reader

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III

feynmanlectures.caltech.edu

118 pointstrevyn21 comments

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29355/reading-the...

I do not think either of Ron Maimon's comments could be easily improved upon.

This stackexchange has been cleaned up as per the "I deleted some old and/or off topic comments" if I remember correctly this article used to have some hilarious deletionist rant about historical physics texts being off topic for physics SE.

I agree; his comments really do cover why I am a huge fan of them. Feynman's lectures are less about the actual physics, and more a tour de force in how he approaches problem solving and intuition of problems. He just uses physics to deliver it (and in doing so, gives you an excellent primer to a large amount of physics topics at a level that an interested party could find accessible).

Having done some tertiary level physics, I've covered much of the content but I still find the Volumes an excellent read not only as a refresher on the subject matter but also a demonstration of how to really nut out a problem and think about it in a way that supports a fuller understanding of the principles at play.

Feynman lamented that his lectures, in and of themselves, were a failure when he presented them to the Caltech classes. I think that misses their true worth of teaching the prospective student how to think through problems. That's a skill that is incredibly valuable to learn and improve upon no matter what your level of physics understanding or indeed what discipline you choose to pursue. To me, the material is largely secondary to that.

"intuition of problems"

I have read several of his books, both non fiction and the autobiography. Would you say intense focus on development of intuition is a Feynman thing or a physicist thing or a general trait of anyone who masters a topic (not mutually exclusive). He is the most persuasive author I can think of WRT his (correct) opinion that development of good intuition results in problem solving.

I think it's a teacher thing. All the best teachers I've observed, both in my life and famous ones, have mastered the teaching of intuition. This is not limited to physics or even the hard sciences. I'd also say that there's a causal link between those who can teach material well and those who truly master a subject matter, so your latter statement is correct.

I've been doing 8.01x and 8.02x on edX - both are taught by Walter Lewin[1] and I have found him to capture the same principles of understanding intuitively the material. Indeed, reading the discussion boards of the subjects I routinely see people laud the homework material for being challenging but when they finally crack it, experiencing a deeper understanding of and insight into the fundamental nature of the subject matter.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lewin

Do you know any further details on his departure from StackExchange? I saw this message on his profile:

> I do not participate on this site any longer, except to respond to comments regarding my own text, if that text is unavailable in another form. I do not accept the political moderation atmosphere here, it is not compatible with open science.

It seemed like he really enjoyed helping people on the site, and there's nothing (left) on meta to show that the situation for him was deteriorating

Dear Feynman Lectures Forum Members,

Since the release of the free online edition of FLP Vol. I in September many of you have written to ask whether we will publish the other two volumes of FLP online. Many have also asked whether we intend to publish PDF editions of FLP that can be read offline. In fact we originally planned to publish all three volumes online when our PDF editions became available, so we could use the release of the online edition to promote sales of the PDFs, which help support our activities. However, that plan didn't materialize for two reasons: (1) the people hired to do the LaTeX->HTML conversion only completed Vol. I, and (2) our publisher had some technical problems that delayed the publication of our PDF editions.

Today I am writing today to inform you that I have been working on the conversion of FLP Vols. II and III into HTML, and I finished Volume III yesterday, so I have just published it. Please check it out at www.feynmanlectures.info/flp. You may notice some new behavior in the floating menu's navigational controls, which now function as follows when the floating menu appears over a Volume's Table of Contents: the next/last buttons cycle through the tables of contents of the three volumes, and the "up" button takes you to the home page of the edition. (When the floating menu appears over a chapter, the navigational controls function as previously: "next/last" cycle through the chapters of the volume and "up" takes you to the table of contents.)

I also wish to inform you that our PDF editions have (finally!) appeared for sale online; you can now find them listed by our other publications, with links to retailers, on the Feynman Lectures Website Buy page (www.feynmanlectures.info/docroot/buy). Please note that while sales of the printed books benefit Caltech and Basic Books, only sales of electronic editions benefit 'The eFLP Group' (myself and Rudolf Pfeiffer), creators of the New Millennium Edition's LaTeX manuscript, who bring you the free online edition of FLP. So, if you want to help support our efforts, please buy the PDFs!

Finally, I want to give you a "heads up" to check out the Books & Arts section in the upcoming December 5th edition of Nature (International weekly journal of science), where there will be a very nice two-page spread about The Feynman Lectures on Physics written by Rob Phillips (Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics and Biology at Caltech).

I hope you enjoy FLP Vol. III. It is my personal favorite of the three volumes! [Regarding Volume II: 10 (out of 52) chapters remain to be converted to HTML. I'm working on it as time permits, and am not sure how long it will take to finish -- hopefully not too long.]

Best regards, Mike Gottlieb --- www.feynmanlectures.info

P.S. Caveat Reader: In converting a large and complex book like FLP from one format to another, inadvertent errors are inevitably introduced. Moreover, you are most likely reading the online edition on a platform I don't have (since I only have 3: an iPad, a PC and a Mac) so you may see things I don't. If you see anything that looks wrong in the online edition -- suspicious-looking text or equations, broken links, or other errata -- we would greatly appreciate it if you would push the "contact us" button on the floating menu, and inform us of the problem. (For this free online edition, we could not afford to hire proofreaders. So, you get to be the proofreaders ;->!

P.P.S. Once again the Simple Machines Forum Software's Newsletter Send function terminated in error, forcing me to re-send this message using gmail. I apologize if you received multiple copies.

I'd love to purchase all three volumes in a way that supports the group responsible for the free online version, but when its only $20 more expensive to get a really nice hardcover edition than it is for a set of .PDFs, that's a really tough sell.

If you gave a discount for purchasing all 3, for around $80, I'd be surprised if you didn't increase your sales volume enough to make more money than you would at a higher price.

I'm confused at the marketing where someone else paying for the download bandwidth means it costs quite a substantial sum of money only slightly less than shipping dead trees around, but a continuously updated live website means its free. I would expect for financial reasons the prices of the products would flip.

Expenses are much higher when I read the website than when I read a pdf.

Lets say there was an android app that basically downloaded and cached the entire website and periodically fetched updates / proofread changes. Basically a git client with a crude wrapper, assuming you're using git for source control (or Hg or subversion or whatever). Would I pay $10 for that app? Sure. I think you'd get lots of sales.

Lovely work. Thank you.

"download in secure PDF format" (from the ebooks.com page linked from feynmanlectures.info/docroot/buy)

Is this some sort of DRM'ed format that's not readable on non-Adobe supported systems?

And, if it is, is there a way to buy a non-DRM version?

Good question. I never buy DRM unless there's a powerful reason (and "I really want it" doesn't qualify).

Would you consider publishing in an actual ebook format, that reflows? I read on Kindles, which usually don't do well with pdf's. That the pdf's also have some sort of "security" makes me think I can't convert it myself as well.

I'd love to be able to buy MP3s of his lectures for download. I have been unable to find them online, does anyone here have any pointers?

About a decade ago, via my public library, I listened to Graham and Dodd's Securities Analysis and subjectively it seemed like it was about 2 hours long (on cassette tapes?) because they didn't bother narrating the equations and diagrams and graphs.

I would imagine a physics lecture audio experience would be similar.

They were publish in audio CD format some time ago. They are available at the Santa Clara public library[1].

A subset of the collection is available on CDs from Amazon. [2]

I have found listening to them very interesting. I am just trying to grasp the concepts, so not being able to see the equations isn't that important to me.

[1] http://s831.us/1duD3P0 [2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Very-Best-Feynman-Lectures/dp/0465...

Thanks for this, I finally succumbed to the 20th Century and bought the CD off of Amazon.co.uk. Just need to dig out a cd player to rip it.

I remain surprised there isn't anyone offering these as paid for MP3 downloads. Seems like the right audience for that.

how do you hear the equations in mp3?

thanks for posting! We still teach out of Volume III in the quantum mechanics course I assisted, I can recommend the entire volume and great that it is available to the world.

Does anybody know why do particles spin in the first place?

I vaguely remember reading that in his book and was inspired to see if anything has improved since then. My interpretation is "no" nothing has improved on that very specific front since the 60s.

Note that you'll get plenty of replies about completely different question, like "does the math work without spin?" and the answer being "no". And some defeatist commentary (if you've ever heard of the "shut up and calculate" interpretation of QM...)

It intuitively seems to have something to do with symmetry and the finite speed of light and maybe dimensionality and the quantization of angular momentum. I have no intuitive explanation of the peculiar behavior of a spin 1/2 particle as it rotates thru 720 degrees. At least not in three dimensions.

There's been several Nobel prizes for the "what" and "how" and whoever figures out the "why" will likely get a prize someday.

Traditionally in physics new theories require what starts out as weird math at the time. So it'll probably come from automata theory or cryptology theory or whatever rather than yet another real analysis discovery or yet another statistical analysis.

If you want a spooky smoke and mirrors faith to latch on to, I am a big fan of "every form of Math ever invented can eventually be applied to Physics, even if it takes a couple centuries to figure out how". Nothing wrong with having peculiar faith based ideas as long as they don't interfere with life.

As I remember, it not that the particles physically spin (at least no one has experimentally observed them spinning, the particles are too small to see) but that they can carry angular momentum. Large objects that we are familiar with that carry angular momentum are spinning, so 'spin' was used as an term, but I've heard people say to think this way is misleading.

Almost everyone's first question in a Quantum Mechanics class is 'why do things behave this way?' As far as I have heard, no one (even those that developed the equations) has anything better than 'these equations produce results consistent with experiment'.

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