Title: The Very Best of the Feynman Lectures
Author: Richard P. Feynman
Pages: 6 discs
Genre: Physics, Non-Fiction
Grade: B+
Synopsis: Richard Feynman is one of the more famous modern physicists. He was a long-time professor and lecturer at UC Berkeley and his lectures have long served as a go-to resource for students of physics. These lectures covered Newtonian physics, Einstein's general theory of relativity, superconductivity, quantum mechanics as well as a couple of other topics.
My Review: I enjoyed listening to these lectures on CD as the audio is taken straight from his courses in the late 1960's. The upside was that you got to hear his lectures and it almost felt like you could be participating. The downside was when his lecture included a demonstration or complex mathematical formula that he was deriving on the board. I was able to use my imagination for the demonstrations, but I got lost during the equation descriptions as they were harder to focus on while I was driving.
1 comment:
As an interesting tidbit: Feynman's introductory physics class, the "Feynman Lectures", were well attended and greatly appreciated . . . by the faculty and graduate students who attended. The actual students didn't like the class much, and many stopped attending. It was a bit much for them. Likewise, there were essentially no programs that have successfully used the books that were produced from these lectures to successfully teach introductory college physics.
It seems that Mark Kac's quote describes Feynman perfectly: "There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre."
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