The Feynman Lectures on Physics

California Institute of Technology ^ | Michael A. Gottlieb, and Rudolf Pfeiffer

[wideminded]

On Feynman's blackboard when he died:

"What I cannot create I do not understand"

and

"Know how to solve every problem that has been solved"

[Lorianne]

Thanks for this!

[GOPJ]

Thanks for sharing.

[samtheman]

Part of the genius of people like Feynman ( and T Sowell) is taking complex ideas and expressing them so that others can understand them.

---

I remember watching Feynman interviews on PBS. Excellent stuff.

[HKMk23]

“Thanks for this — great stuff!”

Yeah ‘tis. Now if I could only get another life in which to peruse it all...

[HKMk23]

Thanks for that. I’ve read there are 6 volumes of the L-L physics series available in the public domain, so keep your eyes peeled.

[HKMk23]

Perhaps more stunning is a line from his letter to his departed wife:
“You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive.”

This illustrates how being possessed of genius limits the pool of persons with whom close relationship can be intellectually satisfying.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/richard-feynmans-letter-to-departed-wife.html

[Moltke]

You’re welcome. The whole series is there! Just click on the authors’ names under the title. (Would’ve posted that initially, but only saw it afterwards myself).

https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22L.D.+Landau+%26+E.M.+Lifshitz%22

[HKMk23]

Thanks; I saved links to volumes 1-3, 5-8, and also the General Physics text they wrote in collaboration with Akhiezer.

The other place I find cool stuff is Google Books (now the Books section of Google Play). I have links to Faraday’s “Experimental Researches in Electricity” volumes I and II; two volumes of Oliver Heaviside’s “Electrical Papers”; two texts on quaternions by Sir William Rowan Hamilton (Lectures, and Elements); Ludvig Heiberg’s translation of the thirteen Books of Euclid’s “Elements” in three volumes; “Matter and Motion” and “The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell”...some works by Steinmetz — the place is a treasure trove of the works of true giants who were being published through the latter 19th Century.

https://books.google.com/

[Moonman62]

“Know how to solve every problem that has been solved”

Part of the genius of people like Feynman ( and T Sowell) is taking complex ideas and expressing them so that others can understand them.

...

Thank Feynman’s father. He did a tremendous job of teaching his son. His method matched what the best cognitive scientists have to say today about the way the human mind learns.

[Moonman62]

I paid a lot of money for those paperbacks. But I did eventually make most of it back on Ebay.

[Moonman62]

The more protons in a nucleus, the stronger is the electrical repulsion, until, as in the case of uranium, the balance is so delicate that the nucleus is almost ready to fly apart from the repulsive electrical force. If such a nucleus is just “tapped” lightly (as can be done by sending in a slow neutron), it breaks into two pieces, each with positive charge, and these pieces fly apart by electrical repulsion. The energy which is liberated is the energy of the atomic bomb. This energy is usually called nuclear energy, but it is really electrical energy released when electrical forces have overcome the attractive nuclear forces.

...

I’ve enraged a few people by paraphrasing the above from page one of volume two. I tell them that the energy released from the fission bomb is electrical.

[Moonman62]

Beautiful, but then his second marriage wasn’t nearly as good:

He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.

Mary Louise Bell divorce complaint

[ladyjane]

Apparently Feynman was quite a ladies’ man. There were stories of his escapades at Princeton and later.

[Moltke]

Thank you - lots of good reading there for the winter months...

[Drew68]

bump