Slashdot Mirror
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.)"
If they wanted to replace the "horrid scanned copies", and it was already in LaTeX, why not upload good PDFs?
What a waste of money.
I assume this was expensive because TeX4ht wasn't up to the task. Was TeX4ht used as a starting point for the conversion tool? Is someone now maintaining an updated TeX4ht? Is the converter available in CTAN?
Surely you didn't spend all this money having people manually convert one structural markup language to another, instead of investing in tools to do it automatically, right?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
MathML for equations and SVG for diagrams. This is a quality transcription from the book to online.
aaand it's down
No.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Nah, that's Einstein. He got lucky once and stole Olinto De Pretto's formula, but after that? Feynman was working all the time.
They have the agreement of the print publisher to produce this free online version. I'm actually somewhat surprised they got it; as the summary notes, they had to convince the publisher that having a free version available online wouldn't hurt print sales, which is often hard to convince publishers of.
The thank-you section of the page lists:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Better, the Caltech mirror version is up, and is on a solid pipe/server, so will probably stay up.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In addition to being a great physicist, Richard Feynman was also quite funny and a pretty big troublemaker in his day. What a great guy. If you get a chance, the book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is well worth the read.
And this gets modded down? I thought we were geeks in here
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Feynman was known for his contributions to physics, for communicating concepts clearly and in an interesting manner, as exhibiting certain traits known as "being human".
Now there are physicists who did far better in each of the three areas than he did, but very few (if any) did as well as he did in all three areas.
rs1n and I both speculate that the reason they don't just release PDFs from the Latex source is that the publisher feels that would compromise physical book sales (and HTML doesn't).
Publish the Latex source and you're back to "publisher won't allow it" land (if our assumption holds).
I studied physics at 'A' level in the early 70's and also at University in 1975, but absolutely NONE of this work was available to me at all... and it predated my courses by a decade :(...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
But isn't the copyright the property of Feynman's heirs? If not, why not? I am probably naive.
Nah, that's Einstein. He got lucky once and stole Olinto De Pretto's formula, but after that? Feynman was working all the time.
De Pretto figured out (or perhaps made a lucky guess) based on his understanding of the lumineferous aether. Einstein derived it from his special theory of relativity. Einstein presented E=mc^2 in a followup letter to his paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" (i.e. it's an interesting derivation, not an essential part of the theory). There was also the photoelectric effect and general relativity. Of the three, special relativity is arguably his least impressive work (Lorentz, et al, were also working towards it).
I guess it also helps that it isn't a book that's been published recently - being an older title, sales are probably thin to begin with. An online copy can easily be a good marketing mechanism in that case.
This page says Caltech holds the copyright. Presumably they require(d) that faculty transfer copyright of works they did in the course of their employment to the university. My guess is that's probably standard provision for faculty, though I'm not positive.
If anything screams kickstarter, this is it.
"Lost time is not found again."
Of the three, special relativity is arguably his least impressive work
Exactly. I mean, his Nobel prize wasn't even for relativity -- it was largely for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, which basically spawned quantum physics. He already had earned his Nobel before he even published E=mc^2.
Calling Einstein a one-trick pony is using an awfully liberal definition of "once".
I come here for the love
"In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics."
Many philosophers would disagree with that.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
Man this takes me back - it's just like the good old days of /., when we'd all head over to some small, random site and /. it. A nice, well-meaning site that had no idea about the tsunami of visitors they were about to be inundated with. Yep, those were good times :)
Have there been any discoveries in physics in the nearly fifty years since its publication that make any of the lectures, well, less than correct? Or can the intrepid autodidact dive right in and take it all at face value?
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
It could do with a tad of CSS sprinkling.
The original post refers to the videos being available. This seems to be a common error. The link points to the Messenger Lectures given at Cornell in 1965(?). As far as I know, the videos are not (legally) available online.
Dunno if an average geek would agree, but I think that place belongs to Carl Sagan. Science isn't supposed to be popular.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
No. Not over-rated. He was capable of communicating ideas, deep and otherwise, clearly, which is very difficult. Consider how to convey the difference in magnitude between gravity and the electromagnetic force. The example he gives goes something like this:
RF: What is your charge right now?
Student: neutral.
RF: Why?
Student: Because we have the same amount of positive and negative charge.
RF: OK. What would happen if you took some electrons from your neighbour?
Student: I would become positive and he would be negative
RF: Yes. Now I want you to imagine you steal some of the electrons from your neighbor. Let's not be greedy. Let's say you take 10% of them. Now you are negative and your friend is positive and you will feel an attractive force towards him. The question is: how strong is the force of attraction. Is it larger or smaller than the weight of the Empire State Building?
Student: Hmmmm...dunno. I'm gonna guess larger.
RF: Yes it is larger. But how much larger. Is the force of attraction between you and your neighbor larger or smaller than the weight of Mount Everest?
Student: I'm gonna go with larger.
RF: Yes, you are correct. In fact, the force of attaction between you and your neighbor WILL BE ABOUT THE SAME AS THE WEIGHT OF THE ENTIRE EARTH!
The above paraphrased lesson emphasizes like nothing I've ever heard before how weak gravity is and how strong the electromagnetic force is. Simply brilliant.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I don't know what the policy was when Feynman made that, but Caltech's copyright policy was (and still looks like) that copyright of books, papers, written work, and stuff related to classes remain with the author unless specifically funded by Caltech (above and beyond simply being an employee there). And when they do get the copyright, you get a portion of the royalties, or can chose to donate a portion of your share to research in a field you specify, and Caltech will match your contribution from their portion of the royalties.
I guess it also helps that it isn't a book that's been published recently - being an older title, sales are probably thin to begin with. An online copy can easily be a good marketing mechanism in that case.
Still is #55,812 rank in Amazon book sales and that is just for the 2011 3-book commemorative set! I'm sure that this clear and somewhat comprehensive physics treatise will sell well long after I'm gone!
True. But for clarity I much preferred Lenoard Susskind's Stanford lectures, which are available on YouTube.
LaTeX to bystroTeX should be easy, although I do not yet have a working converter. BystroTeX produces HTML. The syntax of bystroTeX is Racket Scribble, it is very similar to LaTeX so writing a converter should be more or less straightforward.
I'll get to the copyright in a minute. But there is actually a huge bit of inaccuracy in the post. The videos at Microsoft research in *NOT* the Feynman lectures on physics. Those are actually a part of the Messenger Lectures recorded at Cornell in 1964 called "The Character of Physical Law" and preceded the Cal Tech undergraduate physics lectures which we now know as the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Bill Gates has long been a fan of the lesser known Messenger Lectures. As part of the drive to popularize Silverlight, he actually acquired the rights to "The Character of Physical Law" in order to be able to present them to the public using the Silverlight platform at Project Tuva. Not a bad move for like minded Feynman fans like me.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Hi. I teach undergraduate physics. If you're a clever high school or early college student interested in physics, you may have heard of Feynman, and you may have heard physics people give rave reviews of the Feynman lectures. And hey, he intended these lectures as a first-year college physics course, so that's perfect for you, right?
Wrong. This is not the right place to start learning physics. Feynman has some beautiful insights about how introductory physics concepts connect to "real" modern physics, and a way of cutting through the red tape to elegantly explain concepts in ways that make experienced physicists drool. But that's not what you need. You need the red tape. You need to learn to apply concepts to real situations, you need to get buried in the algebra, trig and calculus and dig your way back out again. Feynman won't help you about that.
Feynman's Lectures on Physics represent how an experienced modern physicist would teach introductory physics to a roomful of other professional physicists. Feynman was a genius, but his lectures are designed to impress, not to teach. You should absolutely read it, and you will love it, later in your career. But start with a more traditional textbook.
That's all I have to say really, thank you :)
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
And frankly calling Einstein a one trick pony shows how fucking little you know of the man's scientific achievements.
That... was kind of my point. I was addressing AC's down-voted comment that "He got lucky once and stole Olinto De Pretto's formula, but after that?" which is so blatantly BS that I called it out in... perhaps too much of an understated manner. :-)
(It occurred to me just after I hit submit that, just as I assumed that you misinterpreted me, I may have misinterpreted you and you didn't mean to say that I was, in fact, calling him a one-trick pony. If true, I apologize, and hopefully we can stop talking past one another. :-))
Also AC's comment wasn't down-voted, I was thinking of his/her parent, the originator of this thread.
Despite the accolades from some, Feynman's lectures are far from clear and perfect. What would be more exciting is a collaborative website for adding comments to this online version to work through the kinks.
The MS research videos do not seem to load.
Hence its geeky
The thing that strikes me about special relativity is how he discarded the notions of space and time that had been fundamental for centuries. It may have been the least impressive from the point of view of mathematical development, but I'm very impressed by the willingness to change large parts of the foundations of physics.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
FWIW, just like the movie airplane, Mr. Feyman spent a significant amount of time often joking...
But in case anyone is interested, the title of this book apparently comes from this exchange...
Mrs. E: "Would you like cream or lemon in your tea, Mr. Feynman?"
RF: "I'll have both, thank you,"
Mrs. E:"Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh. Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman."
Apparently, Sheldon's lack of awareness of social graces is a bit reminicent of Mr. Feynman's account of his own persona... ;^)
But don't call him Sheldon...
Yes! The Feynman lectures are interesting, but I think that Leonard Susskind's lectures are much more clear. Susskind also addresses General Relativity in a more conventional way, without predicating the whole exercise in electrodynamics. Susskind's approach places more emphasis on the underlying geometry, centred around the metric tensor, and is appropriate across multiple applications of continuum mechanics. I think that the Feynman approach is better for those who already have a decent grasp of GR.