Customer Reviews

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat

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The audio for the Feynman Lectures on Physics Volume 1 was awesome. The audio is from various lectures that he gave in 1963 at the California Institute of Technology. This is from the same famous Feynman who's famous in physics, so it was awesome to listen to his actual lectures.

Feynman has a very old-school, New York accent, and he's great to listen to. I might play this lecture instead of music at my next 70s party, just to add thick atmosphere fast.

The material was over my head, but I liked listening to it anyway. Even though this is the basics of Quantum Mechanics, it's still pretty complex stuff. But, Feynman makes it as understandable as possible, and gives real life examples, especially considering that it is almost 50 years old. I liked it a lot better than my college physics classes. I'll definitely listen to this again when I learn more about quantum mechanics.

Pros:
+Lots of info about quantum mechanics
+Very entertaining, and very nice to listen to
+For 50-year old audio, recorded in a lecture hall, this audio was incredible!

Cons:
-He keeps referring to stuff he's drawing on a board, which I obviously couldn't see on the audio book.

R.P. Feynman was more than just a physicist with a staggering intuitive understanding of the machinery of complex equations and physical laws, he was also very human and sane and filled with simple awe at the natural world. If you want to begin to understand the kind of genius he had, and to feel his enthusiasm for teaching, then buy the first book of this set. It is the easiest to follow since it deals with basic physics for the most part. If you have a solid physics background, and/or a high IQ, then venture forth into volume two and three.

This book is an classic in the area of physics. Anyone who likes physics should read it. Feynman makes everything much more simple to understand.

My father-in-law had Richard Feynman as his quantum mechanics professor in physics graduate school at Cornell the late 1940's. According to him, "Feynman was a very good teacher!" Skip forward a little more than ten years and you come to Feynman embarking on formulating a serious of introductory physics lectures directed at undergraduates at Cal Tech in the early 1960's. I purchased these lectures as a college Freshman in Fall 1970 and continue to refer to them for my professional research as well as for personal enjoyment.

In this sweeping introduction to undergraduate physics. 360 pages or more are included in a 9"x12" folio. These pages are not numbered consecutively, but broken into 52 separate chapters. The first 40 pages of the book are devoted to a general introduction to the subject of physics, addressing such concerns as the place of physics among the other sciences, the fundamental forces of nature, and the general scale of the universe from subatomic particles to galaxies.

The next 100 pages are devoted to the sort of mechanics that generally constitutes the first semester of most undergraduate physics courses. Feynman runs through the typical topics of kinematics (defining and calculating position, velocity, and acceleration), dynamics; conservation of momentum, energy, and angular momentum. The damped harmonic oscillator is the final topic treated in mechanics, and the author includes an introduction to complex numbers which makes this topic much more mathematically tractable.

Thirty pages are devoted to special relativity, a topic that was included in the first semester of physics major physics that I took as a Freshman. The next 100 pages address "radiation"--that is, optics, light scattering, and diffraction. Seventy pages are given to "Heat" or what we call thermodynamics and kinetics/diffusion. Thirty pages cover general wave phenomena, including the wave equation and Fourier analysis. An introduction to quantum physics spans all of 15 pages. A final 9-page chapter introduces the student to the place of symmetry in physics, from simple spacial symmetries such as mirror reflection; to the more abstract concepts used in particle physics such as parity, and the relationship between matter and antimatter.

As is the case for all three of the Feymnan lecture volumes, this book is probably not the best choice for one's primary undergraduate textbook. From my own experience as a college Freshman over 40 years ago, however, it is certainly readable and useful, especially when paired with a more conventional treatment of mechanics such as Halliday and Resnick's Fundamentals of Physics: (3 rd. edition, vol. 1 Pt.1).