I think this is my favorite science book. This was in large part due to having Feynman's real voice in my head, as I've heard him often in recorded lectures and documentaries.

The book is transcription of a few lectures Feynman gave on Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), a branch of quantum theory he and Dirac developed. Feynman introduces a few simple rules on how electrons and photons behave (which appear to be easy-to-digest analogs for vector calculus) and then off he goes, explaining the theory and how it describes an enormous amount of phenomena, such as the uncertainty principle, the how lenses and mirages physically work, how light scattering creates particles that travel backwards in time (via an antiparticle), why electrons stay in their orbits, lasers (exclusion principle). The only concept which I felt didn't come across quite so clearly was his discussion of spin.

Once he is satisfied with the level of detail he gave to explaining QED, Feynman quickly runs through the rest of the menagerie of sub atomic particles, doing little more than listing them and noting that the toolkit from QED is useful in describing the interaction of quarks and gluons.

、Chapter 3; electrons and their interaction will be a clue to solve all the phenomena for the universe.
It's the absolutely essential reading physics book for everyone .

Richard Feynman, más allá de haber sido uno de los mejores físicos del siglo XX, y de haber sido premiado con un Nobel por esto, fue un excelente profesor; y el mundo lo conoce muy bien por esto.

Este libro es otra gran muestra de ello; es el compendio de una serie de conferencias que estaban destinadas para explicar Física Cuántica a la esposa de un amigo suyo (que, por supuesto, no era física), así que es una obra excelente para introducirse o incluso para profundizar en el mundo de las partículas subatómicas. Las conferencias se enfocan especialmente en los fotones y en los electrones, y en como siguiendo tres simples reglas logran explicar prácticamente todos los sucesos que ocurren a tal escala; y para hacerlo, recurre nada y nada menos que al "simple" proceso a través del cual la luz atraviesa un cristal.

Una lectura para CUALQUIERA que quiera conocer un poco (más) sobre lo que para muchos parece estar fuera de alcance: la Física Cuántica.

In typical Feynman fashion, this book skates on the edge of hard science and popular science, thereby presenting physicist-level experimentation and results to the widest possible audience. It is obvious that Feynman was passionate about QED (quantum electrodynamics; an unfortunate name, states Feynman). His goal is to do two things: (a) to present QED as "our best example of a good [scientific] theory" and (b) to describe the strange theory of "the interaction of light and electrons" (152, 4). Strange is an understated adjective to describe how photons and electrons interact, as is made clear through the example, chiefly, of the partial reflection problem. Over and over, Feynman sets us up for what common sense would tells us is going to happen, given a certain experiment, and then proves the contrary (or, the completed unexpected). At times, it can seem that these particles are aware of each other and...of us! Some of the major discoveries since Newton are: electrons looked like particles at first, and photons looked like waves at first; but now we find that both objects behave sometimes like waves and sometimes like particles. Further, it "appears that all the 'particles' in Nature--quarks, gluons, nutrinos, and so forth...behave in this quantum mechanical way" (85). The two facts that struck me most were that (a) all particles have an anti-particle; and (b) when the two collide, they annihilate each other and form other particles (98). So, if matter and anti-matter collide, annihilation occurs, and a photon is emitted. Yes, the quantum world is quite strange, and for that all the more intriguing.