The Feynman Lectures on Physics | Richard Phillips Feynman | An original textbook about physics...

The Feynman Lectures on Physics | Richard Phillips Feynman | Great for those it was aimed towards- an imperfect classic

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The Feynman Lectur...

	The Feynman Lectures on Physics Richard Phillips Feynman Addison Wesley Longman, 1970 - 1552 pages average customer review:based on 93 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An original textbook about physics rooted in common sense

Feynman's three-volume textbook should probably not be the only book about physics that you will ever read. But it is certainly among the highly recommended ones.

Feynman was an original thinker - his thinking was always "different". On the other hand, his thinking was also very ordinary, in a sense. He was a very good teacher. He could always understand what is the "natural" conclusion that most of people make about a question, and he could identify where this thinking goes wrong. This is where he focused his teaching energy.

This book contains less equations than most other technical textbooks about the subject. This feature may have some disadvantages, but it certainly has advantages, too. You really need words, not just equations, if you want to explain why some common interpretations of the formalism are misleading, and Feynman does so at many places.

Feynman uses the power of jokes - for example when he defines the concept of a velocity. (Well, the feminists are probably not too happy about this joke, but they are probably not among the readers of this book anyway.) The book also carries another message: about the very basic principles of science as such. What does it mean that a scientific theory is successful? He makes it clear that the physical description of our Universe is one of the main parts of the real culture of our era - and he also humiliates most philosophers.

Even though this was not the main textbook that taught me physics, I still remember several Feynman's points that were important for me - such as his explanations of resonance. But the most remarkable is Feynman's approach to quantum mechanics. Feynman himself is the originator of the "sum over histories" approach to quantum mechanics. But of course, it is not the (only) approach that he wants to explain in the book.

Nevertheless his approach to teaching quantum mechanics is unusual, too. He does not really start with the wavefunctions of a particle moving on the line, which is what a typical textbook does. Instead, he studies several systems with two-dimensional Hilbert spaces. It is an extremely useful approach for the reader to understand the interpretational issues of quantum mechanics.

What do I mean? The wavefunction is not a classical wave, even though it may look so. It is a mathematical object that encodes the probabilities, and the finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces make it more transparent. His examples also make it more obvious that different bases in the same Hilbert space (and different operators) can be equally important and natural, and should be treated democratically. Finally, he also explains the errors of the original reasoning of Einstein (and Podolsky and Rosen) when he suggested that quantum mechanics led to "paradoxes".

Other textbooks often lead the readers to believe that the position operator is special after all, and various deterministic interpretations of the wave function (such as de Broglie's and Bohm's theory of the pilot wave) can be valid - and it is exactly the position of the particle that should also have a "classical" value. Feynman was among those who understood quantum mechanics properly and he chose the right strategy to explain it.

The interpretation of quantum mechanics is not a subject that we teach too carefully, and the students (and not just students) sometimes do not know what is the "canonical" answer. Even though Feynman was a really original physicist, he leads the reader to understand the "orthodox" version of quantum mechanics.

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Great for those it was aimed towards- an imperfect classic

The Feynman lectures on physics is a transcript of some of the lectures Feynman gave at the California Institute of Technology to freshman and sophomore students. It was somewhat of an "experiment"; feynman had never done this before. He purposed to adress these lectures to the most "intelligent" of the class. It should be no surprise that these lectures are difficult. Remember this is Caltech. Feynman assumes knowledge of certain subjects, such as calculus (the review inside is very elementary) and very basic physics equations such as Newton's Gravitational Law. These things aside, this texbook is one of the best college "texbooks" you can get; captivating, and very challenging (boy i've spent nights wrestling over certain abstract topics). Feynman at his best; he can be quite humourous at times: for example when he pokes fun of philosphers. My biggest complaint is Feynman lack of sympathy to those of us that need a bit of clarification. So buy the books, but don't get discouraged if it's hard. However, DO NOT buy this if math is not really your thing and you have no experience of college-level physics.

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the recordings are aged--but relavant

The recordings of Dick Feynman are aged in the static and use of analouge recorders. However, once past this slight annoyance the lectures are fantastic. No intro physics student should be without at least the book, and best to have the audio as well.

It's the best of books, it's the worst of books

Most of the reviewers are right, even the ones that contradict; something Feynman would appreciate.

The books bespeak the Beauty of Physics. Feynman's enthusiasm and
creativity comes through. The wonder and joy of physics is there.
For this alone the books are rightly appreciated. I have the set on my bookshelf and do go back to read it from time to time.

The dark side can be shown by Feynman himself in Volume 3. Regarding the lectures, he says "...I think the system is a failure." It seemed to only reach the brightest students and the ones with the best physics backgrounds. He quotes Gibbons: "The
power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous." In short,
the lectures do NOT make a great text.

I was an undergraduate at Caltech starting in 1970, and the first two years of physics used these books as text. There was a book of problems accompanying the lectures, but the connection was slight. The majority of us had a hard time. Beauty is one thing, but solving problems is another. It took years of grinding through Schaum's and other books to gain an understanding of physics sufficient for a Ph.D., which I now actually have.

So that's how I view these books. They are must-have books, but it is difficult to use them as a text. (Volume 3, the Quantum
Mechanics one comes the closest, I must confess.)

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Did the CalTech students drift away?

Somebody else has said: "The Feynman lectures on physics is a transcript of some of the lectures Feynman gave at the California Institute of Technology to freshman and sophomore students."
A Langara College (Vancouver, BC) instructor said to me that the story is that: apparently the students drifted away from the course and other CalTech professors and researchers attended the lectures.
I don't know if this is true or not; however, these books are not the place to learn physics -- they are great if you are in third year physics or higher and looking back and going -- "Oh! That's what it was all about!"
Having said that, this series could be a great learning series if there was an accompanying exercise/problem book with extra bridging material and math accompanyment.

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