HN

Comments (113)

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  colmmacc
  Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.
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  delichon
  Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
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  vmilner
  Unlike the commercial audio CDs of the lectures the recordings here have the chat before and after the lecture which is fun.My favourite lecture is the standalone "The Principle of Least Action" athttps://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.htmlAudio: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html#Ch19-audi...
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  pm90
  I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles approach is so different than most physics textbooks.
• ajb
  Along these lines, one of the early popular science works is "Letters to a German Princess", which compiles Euler's letters on Natural Philosophy (which is mostly what we today call science and maths) which he was commissioned to write as part of her education. Many were keen to educate their daughters as well as royalty, so the book version sold well. It is, of course, very out of date in terms of the science.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_to_a_German_Princess
• rapatel0
  One gem if you're interested in semiconductors is the Feynman lecture "There's plenty of room at the bottom." He basically laid out the case for the modern nanotechnology age in 1959https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf
• latexr
  This is fantastic. I recently regained an interest in revisiting Feynman lectures but several audios I found on YouTube left me uneasy that they could be AI-generated. I aimed to ensure good sources before diving in again, but hadn’t yet had the opportunity to do so.The videos are particularly interesting in how they include a transcript which is auto-highlighted and one can click around the text to move in the video. That’s a great mode of interaction I wish were more common. I have only found it in Apple’s WWDC videos.It’s missing a way to link directly to a timestamp, and when switching videos from the tabs the URL doesn’t change, but those are minor inconveniences considering the rest of the website.Also kudos on choice of using the structure of the atom image as the “loading” graphic.Thank you to the authors for putting this together.
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  chadrs
  "the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc
• porknbeans00
  God Feynman was such an amazing teacher of complex topics. Never miss upvoting this guy.His involvement in NASA and challenger investigations specifically are also legendary. Watch more Feynman. Totally worth the time investment.
• redditor98654
  My introduction to Feynman was more from other science communicators either quoting him or retelling some story about him and initially it formed a mental picture in my mind that he might be one of those personalities more famous culturally than for his actual scientific achievements. Like how in sports often the more popular players may not be the actual “best” one purely from the sporting skills pov.But then I read more about him and yeah, he is indeed the real deal.
• thetwentyone
  I’ve been looking for a way to listen to the audio offline, but this website is very resistant to scraping. I’d appreciate if anyone knew of a free or paid place to download the audio lectures.
• karcass
  My copy of volume 1 is signed!
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  assemblyman
  It is very interesting to see completely different impressions of Feynman from comments here. As a physicist, I first got introduced to Feynman from his popular QED book as a freshman in college. Over the years, I came to admire his contributions and way of thinking but could also see the cult of personality that has formed.Feynman is definitely not like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Kaku. He was a very creative and technically sophisticated physicist. All his popular books are based on lectures he wrote and gave but they were mostly "side projects" e.g. computation, lectures on gravitation, six easy pieces etc.To get a better sense of his work, I would highly recommend:- The Beat of a Different Drum by Jagdish Mehra- Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick- Selected Papers - https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4270 (expensive and technical)- QED and the men who made it by SchweberThere are also many historical physicists who are surprisingly unknown outside the field - Schwinger, Tomonaga, Landau, Sidney Coleman, Murray Gell-mann, Nambu, Steven Weinberg, Ken Wilson, Curtis Callan etc. I just randomly picked a few names before the 90s but these are all scientific giants. For example, Schwinger's papers are notoriously hard to read but his books are great after a first course. Sidney Coleman gave beautiful lectures on QFT. Landau is extremely famous for his 9 books with Lifshitz. It definitely is very surprising that Feynman has such an outsized share of interest. Maybe because he was a gregarious outgoing character?Another interesting aspect is how a person is often viewed as an authority or even a genius because their work introduces an audience to the subject. Feynman with his lectures. To a far lesser extent (in my opinion), one sees this with Andrej Karpathy and Jeremy Howard. This is not to take away from their wonderful teaching work. I know how hard it is to distill material and convey it. But, there's a whole web of contributions that leads to a subject maturing enough to be taught clearly.As I get older, I find it less useful to assign labels (names) to discoveries and contributions. As Feynman himself said in a lecture after drawing a Feynman diagram, "this is THE diagram" (and not the Feynman diagram).
• thomasahle
  On the topic of lecture notes, I can really recommend Scott Aaron's Quantum Information lecture notes: https://www.scottaaronson.com/qclec.pdf
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  MS007
  Feynam is my hero. I have Volumes I, II, and III of his red hardbound books. His biography, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, is one of my favorites.
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  evanb
  I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.
• anon
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• ncb9094
  I remember watching these for my JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) of India
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  mmooss
  What has changed in 60 years, I wonder? If you are teaching this material, what do you have to update and/or contextualize?
• willtemperley
  Thank you I’ve been looking for this. His method of delivery is so clear I find it immensely relaxing.
• anon
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• bibimsz
  not lost on me that the top of hacker news came from 60 years ago.we are entering the period of mourningwhat waswon is now lostand the later days once feared are...now here.(the poet called bib)
• richardfeynman
  Thanks for posting this.
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  ReptileMan
  There is a whole genre of youtube videos with AI generated Feynmann voice based on those lectures. They are of surprisingly high quality.
• SachinnJainn
  Amazing!
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  iberator
  [flagged]