Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online

I have to disable safety mode to watch these? WTF?

Yes, but isn't that basically the same thing as most streaming services? Netflix? To me, 'clinging' makes it sound like the idea has gone away.

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.

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...

I do not regret buying the hardcover copies for one second. I prefer reading stuff ilke this on paper - digital makes a good reference for quick checking of facts but I get a better, deeper understanding of it when I sit down and read it on paper at a desk.

If you did that it'd be super awesome. Maybe something like http://www.metacademy.org/about but for physics?

Probably not exactly the dependency map you are looking for, but perhaps still very useful. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hph.html

> Is this worth reading for someone without a particular need to understand physics in depth?

For someone just curious about modern physics, without any specialized knowledge or advanced mathematical skill, it might be overwhelming.

I suspect many of us would say yes. One of the things Feynman was known for was his knack for bringing ideas down to earth.

As he opens in QED, you won't be able to solve heavy physics problems analytically in a short period of time, but with a little effort, you'll certainly be able to qualitatively understand the situation. And there's quite a lot of beauty to have there, even without heavy math (but there will be math!)

Yes, it is especially useful as they are vary approachable. That said they are also as deep as any 3 semester course in physics you're likely to take so at some point you will need the math skills to keep up.

The honest answer is, unless your profession is in the physical sciences or hardware engineering, learning physics from this or other sources will probably not be useful.

Whether it's worthwhile is to at least some extent a value judgment, and also as I see it, depends to some extent on what else you would have done with the time. If you have a block of time allocated for work, and you're thinking of spending it reading about physics instead of reading documentation on something you do actually need, that's probably suboptimal. If you've finished work for the day, you have a block of time allocated for intellectual leisure and you're trying to decide between reading about physics versus, say, the latest Dungeons & Dragons rules, in my opinion the former is more worthwhile.

I feel quantum computing will become a critical field, starting a decade or so from now.

Since it's still in its infancy, higher level abstractions won't be engineered for atleast another 2-3 decades.

So the first few engineers who get into it - even software engineers - will have to grapple with fundamental quantum mechanical concepts, in the same way computer engineers in the 1940s-60s had to grapple with fundamental electrical engineering concepts.

Feynman's Volume 3 is an especially useful introduction to these fundamental concepts, and I feel a good investment for the future.

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.

If you're reading it "on line" you've already downloaded it.

Hopefully some talented soul will write a script to convert these HTML files into mobie, epub and PDF.

Agree with this.

Also if I get into a book, I always end up buying the thing as I don't want any electronic distractions taking away from it.

To be sure, I too prefer a book. But there are plenty of times I would love the option to reference a book at an inconvenient time (like when I'm at work 50 miles away). Having a low fidelity option is preferable over none at all in these cases.

Someday we'll have an honest-to-god book with e-ink, which will reconfigure itself to whatever we want to read and get the best of both worlds. (PopSci promised me this more than a decade ago and I'm bitter it hasn't happened yet!)

The plural of anecdote is data, so FWIW I'm exactly the opposite: not just for textbooks, but even for hardcover literature books I have right there in my bookshelf, I often end up digging up some PDF or Google Books version regardless. I guess I miss the scrolling/zooming, plus all the meta-textual, cross-referencing stuff like having multiple copies of the book in different sections side by side, easy access to references and definitions, etc.

What one finds 'classical' is highly relative: remember Socrates famously despised books as a degrading and pernicious medium, for one [1].

[1] http://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/

this is obviously a great news for Physics lovers like myself. I have been always intrigued and fascinated by Physics and unfortunately did not able to pursue it as my career but having free access to Feynman's lectures would definitely ignite passion in me and lot of others who are interested in subject.

Feynman actually found that the lectures kind of flopped as a semesters courses. It was too intense, IIRC.

Perhaps you misspoke or I'm not understanding correctly what you mean but from the book:

"Another thing we can see from Fig. 1–4 is why ice shrinks when it melts. The particular crystal pattern of ice shown here has many “holes” in it, as does the true ice structure. When the organization breaks down, these holes can be occupied by molecules. Most simple substances, with the exception of water and type metal, expand upon melting, because the atoms are closely packed in the solid crystal and upon melting need more room to jiggle around, but an open structure collapses, as in the case of water."

Silverlight only. Too bad MS cares more about pushing their proprietary technology than sharing important historical / educational material.

Susskind's is much shorter and goes into very little detail. It's really intended to give you a foundation for learning physics, while Feynmann's is meant to teach you lots of physics.

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. Calculus was basically invented to solve physics problems.

It's generally a three semester to a full two year sequence at most universities. You can of course go faster or slower depending on your own capacity to self-study and learn, but most bright people will probably fall somewhere in that spread to get a solid grasp of the total contents.

That said, it's always helpful at first to skim through and get a surface understanding of the whole picture before you dive in and try to understand it all. You can probably complete a surface scan like that in a few weeks or months. I studied these becomes along with my high school physics course and completed the books in about a year, but I was spending double the usual amount of time on this stuff. As a high school student, I didn't have anything better to do, but as an adult I'd expect it to take me two dedicated years.