The Meaning of It All
In April 1963, Richard P. Feynman gave a series of remarkable lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle. These three consecutive talks were classic Feynman - full of wit and wisdom - but their subject matter was wholly unexpected: Feynman spoke not as a physicist but as a concerned fellow citizen, revealing his uncommon insights into the religious, political, and social issues of the day. Now, at last, these lectures have been published under the collective title The Meaning of It All. Here is Feynman on mind reading and the laws of probability and statistics; on Christian Science and the dubious effect of prayer on healing; and on human interpersonal relationships. Here is the citizen-scientist on the dramatic effect simple engineering projects could have on the plague of poverty; the vital role creativity plays in science; the conflict between science and religion; the efficacy of doubt and uncertainty in arriving at scientific truths; and why honest politicians can never be successful.
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What Hacker News says
- I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.
CULTURAL
Einstein - Essays in Humanism
Frayn - Copenhagen
Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?
de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole
Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart
Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics
Macaulay - The Way Things Work
Paulos - Innumeracy
Sagan - Cosmos
Sagan - Broca's Brain
Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World
Salam - Science in the Third World
Seife - Zero
Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight
POPULAR
Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)
Feynman - The Meaning of It All
Feynman - Lectures on Physics
Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics
Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps
Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity
Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach
Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
Polya - How to Solve It
Schrödinger - What is Life?
Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum
Susskind - Quantum Mechanics
Wallace - Everything And More
Weinberg - The First Three Minutes
Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.
TEXTS
Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )
Abelson and Sussman - SICP
Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics
Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)
Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics
Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation
Feynman - Feynman's Thesis
Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals
Fermi - Thermodynamics
Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice
Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)
Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics
Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)
Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics
Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series
Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization
Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory
Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism
Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology
Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)
Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation
Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps
Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems
Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III
Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell
- I argue the best primer is Feynman's "The meaning of it all: Thoughts of a citizen-scientist" and "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". I'm not just linkbaiting HN's love for Feynman: Feynman was an active, practicing scientist and besides being introspective, he had a great knack for explaining things in a perspective accessible to non-scientists. Kuhn is worth reading, though if you are a scientist and want to get a more-in-depth analysis of philosophy of science that is laid out formally.
- "The meaning of it all: thoughts of a citizen-scientist". Probably worth reading more than any academically lionized philosopher.
"From Heaven Lake" is a really good non-fiction book that reads like a fiction.
- Feynman has a philosophy book (_The Meaning of It All_) which is excellent. He discussed philosophy of science frequently in his books and lectures, and sometimes other types of philosophy, e.g. educational philosophy.
Feynman is not noted as a philosopher, which perhaps proves the point that people are looking for the wrong thing in a philosopher.
- 1."The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson 2."Super Crunchers" by Ian Ayres 3."Six Great Scientists" by J.G Crowther 4."The Meaning of It All" by Richard Feynman 5."Dealers of Lightning"(The story of XEROX Parc) by Michael Hiltzik 6."What I Believe" by Betrand Russell
The above titles can all be found at audible.com, and probably through itunes too.
- Feynman gave a talk once which included a by-the-way remark like "this is not a scientific age". It stuck in my mind because of course that wasn't the common view of the 1950s or 60s when he said it. The obvious reason to say it is that some people still consume astrology, etc. But I came to realize that this is the sort of non-scientific-ageness that stands out. About all sorts of important things in daily life we don't collectively act as if we're curious about the truth and ready to do what it takes to learn it. If this were a scientific age then not routinely checking practices like this would stand out. Everyone would wonder if they had something to hide.
Programming was less routinely scientific like that in my own experience earlier in my career when automated testing was less common.
I think the Feynman talk was the one that turned into his posthumous book The meaning of it all, though I'm not sure.
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