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. ( )

(Reprinted from my blog)

I wasn’t hugely impressed with this book on introductory physics comprised of (edited) lectures that Feynman gave in the early 1960s for a freshman physics course at CalTech. But I suspect that is for a reason that doesn’t reflect so badly on Mr. Feynman. I took Physics for Engineers for two semesters in college. One semester was required for the computer science degree I never got, and I went ahead and took the second semester for the fun of it. This was in 1988 or 1989, nearly three decades after Feynman taught. I suspect the University of Idaho had long ditched the boring methods against which Feynman’s style rebelled. Perhaps my professor even took physics at CalTech.

The introduction makes much of Feynman’s breezy non-formalistic style. It worked quite well in this book for the parts of physics which I understood, such as the theory of atoms, the interaction of physics to other sciences like chemistry and biology, the conservation of energy, and some of quantum physics. For the parts I don’t understand, I still didn’t get much of an understanding, particularly his brief discussion of the strong and weak nuclear forces.

At this point, I’m not inclined to read further books from this lecture series since they will cover areas of physics I don’t understand but want to. In other words, this wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t particularly helpful to me either. ( )