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Ha, that reminds me of Feynman's response to folks who thought QED was too complicated to be true:

"You don't like it? Tough! Go to another universe, where the rules are simpler and more philosophically pleasing!"

Or something to that effect, see the whole show here.

If you like Feynman, I hope you have watched these lectures, the video quality isn't great but the content more than makes up for it.

Apparently, reading and writing is not a hard requirement for being a mathematician.

Neither is artihmetic, as demonstrated by Emma King -- a theoretical physicist with both dyslexia and dyscalculia. If you've got a few minutes to spare, I highly recommend watching this interview with her; it's quite fascinating to see someone incapable of basic arithmetic be so adept at abstract maths.

What's all this? I stopped reading after Q.E.D.

Har har!

Not that it's really apropos your post, but this seemed like a good chance to post this for anyone who's interested in what this Quantum Electrodynamics stuff is about.

It's a fantastic lecture series by Richard Feynman explaining QED in detail to non-physicists.

Have you listened to Feynman explaining things?

I feel sorry for you if the word 'curriculum' only has negative connotations for you. Even if it were just a lecture, some are better than others. What I meant is that an engineer gets to spend a day with a kid or two, showing them something cool that they do.

If you're going to recall that quote then you should also recall his open acknowledgement that our understanding of physics is no different in kind from the Mayan priests' understanding of astronomy. We have better mathematical machinery, better physical machinery, better training at avoiding unproductive lines of reasoning. Listen to him say so. Start 20 minutes in, listen for 15 minutes. tl;dr version: "I don't understand it either".

And Feyerabend seems to have had a lot of support for his position:

To support his position that methodological rules generally do not contribute to scientific success, Feyerabend provides counterexamples to the claim that (good) science operates according to a certain fixed method. He took some examples of episodes in science that are generally regarded as indisputable instances of progress, e.g. the Copernican revolution), and showed that all common prescriptive rules of science are violated in such circumstances. Moreover, he claimed that applying such rules in these historical situations would actually have prevented scientific revolution.

Sounds like that point could easily be mis-taken as "there is no such thing as the scientific method".

For your enjoyment

Feynman - The Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures

Bah. Silverlight.

I'm without Flash ATM. Is this the same series parent posted?

You can get the lectures here:

http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

And avoid the silverlight embrace, extend, extinguish, scam.

http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8 Requires QuickTime or RealPlayer I think, I don't remember which. But they're already online for free.

I saw 4 feynman lectures put online here, he became my hero instantly. He was a great man.

If you like Faynman here are some of his lectures. http://vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

That's basically quantum computing for you. You can get them involved in such a state that they can influence one another even though they're not even next to one another (action at a distance). Hence they're sort of invisibly entangled within one another, if you mess around with one the other will instantly change. This is pretty great though, because if you can get all these things to represent a calculation, and act upon it, it instantly changes at this other place you can read them. Even better, if someone else tries to read it at the other place it'll show up back at the origin.

Quantum isn't really a buzzword, it actually means that it's taking advantage of the fact that energy is discrete rather than continuous. It's supposed to be used in opposition to classical or Newtonian mechanics, which assumes that energy is continuous, and has a huge amount of crazy consequences.

If you're REALLY interested in learning about quantum mechanics I'll one up the sister post and recommend you some of Feynman's lectures. In the first video here he whips through almost the entire history of physics and why QM is different: http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8

Anyone who wants to watch some great Science shows on the net can tune to Vega Science Trust... Link below. Great discussions and presentations from leading scholars.

http://www.vega.org.uk/

That is not correct. Read up on QED, the most accurate description of the interaction of light and electrons ever devised (Quantum Electro-Dynamics).

Light travels at a variety of speeds in the face of interactions or when travelling through free space. What is constant is the number of times the little arrow spins in a given vector length through spacetime (watch the Feynman lectures to get this "little arrow" reference at http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8)

I mean, what's the imaginary component of a matter wave, anyhow?

Wish Feynman was still around to explain stuff like this.

Try this http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8. If you don't have the bandwidth you can buy them from the University of Auckland.

For one hell of an interesting introduction into the physics behind various particles, albeit from 1979, check out these lectures by the legendary Richard Feynman. Very informative for us without a quantum physics background.

What! You mean I'll have to keep watching this crap!

http://www.vega.org.uk/series/lectures/feynman/ind ex.html

http://www.msri.org/publications/video/

Can people add some more? I've heard theres some really good science programs out on the net and I want to see them all.

I love the idea of making lectures available the public. I recently found these lectures by Richard Feynman online, available for free, and I'm watching them as I get the chance. I hope to keep learning my entire life, and free online lectures will certainly help.

try this
lots of lectures, including Feynman. Also links to other sources.

How about the Feynman lectures? I don't think it would be too bad just listening to them, instead of watching them, given Feynman's charisma.

Anyway, you can probably find an audiobook like this one.

Paul

Top and Bottom were originally known as Truth and Beauty. Okay maybe not originally, but I've sure seen them presented that way. Hell I even saw Feynman refuse to name them in his QED Lecture Series, and I'm betting it's because he couldn't bring himself to call them Truth and Beauty.

C60 is not the largest all-carbon molecule. For example, some C240 forms along with other Fullerenes. Go watch some videos about buckyballs.