The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Perseus Books is pleased to continue its program to publish the complete collection of audio recordings of Feynman's famous Caltech course on which his classic textbook, Lectures on Physics, was based. This season we present the third and fourth volumes, which together we call "Feynman on Matter". We plan to release two more volumes per list until all III lectures have been published.These two volumes in the collection comprise a complete course on matter: Volume 3: From Crystal Structure to Magnetism includes chapters on the internal geometry of crystals, the refractive index of dense materials, elastic materials, dielectrics, and magnetism.Volume 4: Electrical and Magnetic Behavior includes chapters on propagation in a crystal lattice, semiconductors, the independent particle approximation, the Schrodinger equation in a classical context, superconductivity, paramagnetism and magnetic resonance, and ferromagnetism. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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- Physics? Yes. Feynman Lectures On Physics and Computation. Landau & Lifshitz. If you like SICP you might like SICM. Nielsen & Chuang's Quantum Computation and Quantum Information then Faulkner's Modern Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Information
General advice take a look at the references in works you've recently read and look for lower level topics that interest you, after repeating a few times you'll find your way to physics or chemistry and you can use the above as reference works. The best resource is the one you actually use. If https://www.youtube.com/learning works better for you then use it.
- Normal students learn the material from normal textbooks. The Feynman Lectures on Physics are a fantastic supplement and a great reference for people who already have a solid background. They’re not a practical introduction. Feynman acknowledged in his preface that, as an intro physics course, the Lectures were a failed experiment.
Especially as a beginner it’s possible to read along with the Feynman Lectures and think you’re getting it, without really getting very much.
Another way you may hear this same point: “only Feynman could get away with doing things in this crazy unrigorous way. You better do things normal and check obsessively, and understand the normal approach very clearly before you do anything weird.” That’s mostly fair but it’s incomplete. Feynman also checked the living shit out of everything he wrote. He just doesn’t show all the checking, so he appears to be fast and loose.
- He taught a two-year introductory physics course at Caltech from 1961 to 1964, which gives him some experience with the matter though. He was known as "The Great Explainer", due to his ability to help people understand and more importantly, be inspired by science and the world around them*. His materials from those lectures were converted into "The Feynman Lectures on Physics", a highly regarded physics textbook. so I wouldn't have chosen education as my example.
In support of 793 however, he didn't do well with bureaucracy so I'd not listen to his advice on how to run something that favored rigorous rule following even when the rules don't make sense**.
* https://www.commoncraft.com/honor-richard-feynman-great-expl...
** https://laurakornish.com/2019/04/no-joking-matter-feynman-on...
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics was used as the textbook for Caltech's introductory physics course for nearly two decades, and it is still used in some universities. I learned physics from it and have met many Caltech alumni who used it as their textbook, all of whom felt they learned a great deal more than "intuition" from it. So I am guessing you've never actually tried to learn something from it if you feel that way.
- Feynman Lectures on Physics books. It might just be the right timing for me as I've only recently really started to grasp calculus and linear algebra, but a lot of things are clicking into place as I read.
- Fiction: Independent People by Halldór Laxness or Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Non-Fiction: The Feynman lectures on Physics.
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