Subtitled “Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher”, the six easy pieces are drawn from Richard P. Feynman's The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963, originally prepared for publication by Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands). That Lectures book is chosen by Discover magazine as one of the top 25 science books of all time.

The lecture-pieces are collected with a view of compiling the six easiest chapters in the Lectures. Reading them is like attending an introductory course to physics. It is definitely a painless approach to the subject considering that the entire Lectures edition (definitive and extended) runs in three volumes and weighs 10.8 pounds! Pieces is to laymen as Lectures is to physicists.

My full review is at:
http://booktrek.blogspot.com/2009/08/... ( )

http://pergelator.blogspot.com/2008/0... ( )

What can be said? There are few educators as enthusiastic about physics as Feynman. Here he covers the atomic hypothesis and some simple consequences, which personally I found to be the most enjoyable lecture; "basic physics" which is a whirlwind tour of particle physics at the time; the relation of physics to the other sciences; the conservation of energy, in which he heuristically derives gravitational potential energy with little math; the law of universal gravitation; and finally an introduction to quantum behavior.

Those with a physics background and lay people alike should all be able to learn something from here, or if not see something they thought that they knew in a fresh way.

Also the introduction by philosopher and physicist Paul Davies is good and deflates the hyperobjective and impersonal myth, predominent among the way we teach science, that personality and idiosyncratic preferences don't show up in the results of scientists.

It is interesting to note that one can see some "datedness" in these lectures. This isn't a fault but a nice historical picture of things as they were at the time of 62(?): e.g.: the strong force was not fully understood, the weak force was not fully understood, and there was no unification with EM; there was no "standard model"; a lot of inflationary cosmology had not been developed; the theory of plate tectonics was not accepted; Lorenz' results on aperiodic flows was just being published, so the earth sciences were not very well understood.

All in all, a great read. ( )

I have a background in chemistry so I cannot aproach this as a novice might - I have the feeling though that for a beginner the book might skim too quickly over a number of concepts. For all others the book might shed a different - and refreshingly so - light on what they already know. Good and interesting read but really only a quick primer to physics. ( )

A very enjoyable, but very condense look at the essentials of physics as taught by a brilliant and engaging professor. I just wish there was a little more depth. ( )