Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. 1 Released in HTML Format

Dr. Richard Feynman's lectures on physics have been iconic standards of physics education for the past five decades. Videos of the series were put online at Microsoft Research a few years ago, but now the entirety of Volume 1 is available over simple HTML (mirror). In a letter to members of the Feynman Lectures Forum, editor Mike Gottlieb said, "It was an idea conceived many years ago, when through FL website correspondence I became aware of the many eager young minds who could benefit from reading FLP, who want to read it, but for economic or other reasons have no access to it, while at the same time I was becoming aware of the growing popularity of horrid scanned copies of old editions of FLP circulating on file-sharing and torrent websites. A free high-quality online edition was my proposed solution to both problems. All concerned agreed on the potential pedagogical benefits, but also had to be convinced that book sales would not be harmed. The conversion from LaTeX to HTML was expensive: we raised considerable funds, but ran out before finishing Volumes II and III, so we are only posting Volume I initially. (I am working on finishing Volumes II and III myself, as time permits, and will start posting chapters in the not-too-distant future, if all goes as planned.)"

Comments

Re:Errata?

[fermion]

Yes. In fact recent discoveries in physics has shown many of Newton's laws to be incorrect. We still teach them in high school and college, but that is probably just because physics people are particularly lazy. I am sure much of what

To be serious, science is a process, not a collection of trivia. This is often the disconnect of science people and non science people. For example we once thought there was an æther that light traveled. It was then found that there was not. Those who don't understand science take this as an indictment of science and it's inferiority to other paths to knowledge. Scientist, however, see it as evidence of the resilience and ability of science to lead us to more effective models of nature.