Oncelikle Feynman Lectures'dan parcalar oldugunu belirtmek lazim. Zaten elinde hali hazirda olanlarin edinmesine gerek yok. Bu tur kitaplar okuyunca, bize ogretilen tum temel bilgilerin birileri tarafindan kendi kafalarina gore bir sekilde siniflandirilmis ve bir diziye oturtulmus oldugunu anliyoruz. Ve bu tarihsel (ve dolayisiyla birbirleriyle bilgi artisi dizisi) seklinde anlatimdan cok daha kotu bir egitim yontemi. Boyle dusununce bilim egitiminin nasil olmamasi gerektigi ortaya cikiyor: Bizimki gibi olmamali!

Bir ornek: Kacis hizi nedir? Nasil hesaplaniyor? Klasik ogretme sekli, formulu yazip, oradan roketin yercekiminden kacacagi en dusuk hizi hesaplamaktir. Ama bunu bu sekilde anlatirsaniz, isterseniz okulun bahcesinde deney yapin, isterseniz en hayal gucu canlandirici yontemleri deneyin, olmaz! Ama mesela bu kitaptaki gibi yere paralel atilan top mantigiyla anlatirsaniz gercekten akil acici olur.

Bir baska ornek: Kuantum kurami. Bu derslerde Feynman, Kara Cisim Isinimi'ndaki paradoxu unutmus / es gecmis, ama bunun disinda tum taslar tek tek bir iki dakikalik bir derste verilmis durumda. Isin ilginci bir iki ornekle neden baska turlu aciklanamayacagini, bu yondeki cabalarin umutsuzlugunu mukemmel veriyor Feynman. Yani bizdekinin tam tersi.

Un libro esencial para todo aquel que se quiera dedicar a una rama del STEM, en especial Física.
Las seis piezas son los átomos, la física básica, como se relaciona la física con otras ciencias, la energía, la gravedad y la mecánica cuántica. Cada tema es explicado para ser bien digerido además de tener como profesor a alguien como Richard Feynman es algo que vale la pena leer.

Feynman was a genius, but these pieces are by no means easy. It's not a surprise that the lectures that formed the basis for this book were initially attended by undergraduates who were gradually supplanted by post-graduates. True, my degree is in medieval English and history, but I do have an O-Level in physics, but I found most of this hard to absorb.

If I had been given this as a 14-year old, I would have concluded that physics is not for me. It's just not pitched at that level. The chapter on gravity was easy, but conservation of energy was beyond my intellect.

It's good, but it's not easy.

I think that, when reading this book, you have to be familiar with physics and maths. There are a lot of books claiming to be for the neophytes in physics/maths/astrology etc. but, truth be told, there is little to be learned when in that position. Which is why people shouldn't consider this book as being no good just because they haven't reached the paradise of enlightment which was promised to them. Such a thing isn't possible. Not from a single book, as far as I know, and anyway, not from this one.
I've been studying both maths and physics for quite some time, but in the manner of a poorly prepared educational system, meaning the focus was more on solving problems and ingesting pages of theory and less on really understanding them. And Feynman's lessons really shed some light on the mess in my head. I can't claim I thoroughly understood everything in this book, but I surely enjoyed Feynman's way of following gradually to smaller scales what happens in an apparently simple process, until he reaches the "core" of it.
Also, you can't ignore his way of being even poetic at times, which is really why this book won my heart. I have a weakness for science being romanticized. And all ovations go to Richard Feynman for doing this so tactfully.

In the early 1960s the renown physicist, Richard Feynman, delivered introductory courses on physics to first and second year undergraduate students at Caltech, in the USA. His lectures were very popular at the time and whilst aimed at undergraduates, it wasn't uncommon for graduate physics students to infiltrate his classes; the one thing Feynman could be assured of was a full house each time he came to teach this course. The lectures, after some editing, were published in three large volumes. To provide a flavour of the overall series, this book extracts just six from the collection and, as the title of this book suggests, these are regarded as being six of the easier ones to understand. They're entitled "Atoms in motion", "Basic physics, "The relation of physics to other sciences", "Conservation of energy", "The theory of gravitation" and "Quantum behaviour". (There is a companion volume published under the title "Six not-so-easy pieces" but I've not attempted to read that.)

I was attracted to this book not so much by the subject matter, but more by my interest in Feynman himself. He has a solid reputation for being an inspirational teacher and I was keen to see how he managed to achieve this. I was expecting him to take a different strategy from the norm and I wasn't disappointed. To illustrate what I mean, in his lecture on the atom he didn't follow the conventional approach of describing the structure of atoms and building up from there, yet by the end of the talk his students would have heard a physicist's explanation of why blowing on a bowl of soup cools it down. His approach to teaching was so different to what is usually done.

Understandably, given the date of the lectures, there have been major developments in physics, and science in general, since the lectures were first presented. For instance, the talk on nuclear physics is very out of date because the make-up of protons and neutrons was not understand at that time to the extent that it is now. Likewise, the lecture covering the links between physics and biology pre-dates the discovery of the genetic code. Therefore, it is pointless reading this book to gain an understanding of the latest theories. Nevertheless, not everything has changed in 50 years and some lectures are as relevant today as they were then. For example, the lecture on the conservation of energy was wonderfully presented, especially the section on potential energy where Feynman used illustrated examples to explain the conservation of potential energy in reversible machines. On the other hand, I felt he made heavy weather of his account of the two slit experiment in his lecture on quantum mechanics and I've read much better explanations elsewhere. To a marked extent Feynman did over complicate much of his material but this is to expected since his stated intention was to teach to slightly beyond the level of the brightest students in each class; of course, whether or not this was the best strategy is open to debate.

Overall, this book of six "easy" lectures provides remarkable insight into Feynman's style of teaching. He comes across as someone who knew his subject matter inside out, who had boundless energy and complete self-confidence, and who wanted to stretch the minds of his students.

I enjoyed chapter one the most, which I reread. The three last chapters were three hard pieces for me - I could not deeply understand other than making sense of the words themselves. Nonetheless, enjoyable to read throughout, such a fascinating way of explaining things, Feynman had.

This line made me smile: "If one cannot see gravitation acting here, he has no soul" (on the globular star cluster).

A brilliant book, of course. There is no one who can explain physics with quite the clarity and insight that Feynman can.

This book contains six chapters from The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Reading it whets your appetite and makes you want to go and read the whole thing.

Nu cred că poți vorbi despre această carte fără să vorbești despre Richard Feynman.
Deși poate nu-i la fel de cunoscut ca Einstein sau Oppenheimer, e unul din cei mai interesanți fizicieni. Nu țin minte cum am dat peste autobiografia sa, "Vă țineți de glume, domnule Feynman!', dar țin minte că a fost una din primele carti pe care le-am citit cu drag (cred că trebuie să o recitesc și să scriu și acolo un review).
Pe langa munca lui in fizică cuantică e cunoscut și pentru 'Feynman technique', dar și pentru modul în care reușea să explice și cele mai complexe concepte din fizică, și nu numai. Bill Gates o spune foarte fain: "Feynman e cel mai bun profesor pe care nu l-am avut". Iar această calitate se vede in carte.
Aici sunt câteva lecții din cursurile lui de fizică, cursuri pe care le-a facut pentru a face fizica cât mai captivantă pentru studenți. Fiind un student care abia și-a luat examenul la fizică, pot să spun că multe dintre lucrurile explicate aici au fost mult mai ușor de înțeles. Asta datorită modului în care Feynman ia exemple din viața reală, le explică modul de funcționare, iar apoi aplică tot ce ți-a prezentat și, voila, acum știi ce-i energia cinetică (și multe altele). Desigur, sunt și concepte mai avansate, cum ar fi fizica cuantică, care sunt mai greu de înțeles.
Overall, e o carte foarte bună dacă ai și cea mai mică înclinație spre fizică.

i think Isaac newton became one with me by the end of this

so this book (if you were at all interested) is a collection of the six 'most basic' lectures delivered by richard feynman when he taught caltech 1st year physics undergrads in the early 1960s. feynman is famously an excellent communicator and very good at explaining physics-y things and coming up with analogies. honestly though, i was a little disappointed.
admittedly, i thought the chapter on quantum behaviour (6) was *fantastic*, and probably the best and most thorough explanation i've come across. the maths was a little elusive and unexplained, but that didn't bother me too much as i'm sure i'll learn about it in time & it's not necessary to understand what's going on. but i would definitely recommend this chapter (which you can read online for free - http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.ed...) to anyone to wants to understand quantum behaviour. + i did also enjoy the first two chapters in the book as well, which were on atoms in motion and basic physics.
the rest of the book, however, was quite meh. the chapter on the relationship between physics and other sciences (3) was often very vague and seemed to be stating the obvious a lot of the time, although i did find it quite interesting in places (for instance the section on geology and biology, even if the latter seemed to drag on a bit). chapter (4) which was on conservation of energy was pretty confusing sometimes and otherwise pretty unmemorable.
so, pretty hit and miss... 2.5 stars?

The subtitle of the book is, “Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher.” That would be the legendary Richard Feynman, supposedly the best physics teacher who ever explained the inexplicable. I followed his first two lectures just fine, and mostly skimmed the third, which concerned the relationship of physics to other branches of science. Then I came to lecture number four, “Conservation of Energy, “ which started with a diagram of a supposedly simple weight lifting machine. I read Feynman’s explanation of the diagram, and then read it again, and couldn’t make anything out of it. If he had been standing at my shoulder, I could have said, “Oh, legendary teacher, put this in different words so I can understand it.” But he died 32 years ago. I knew better than to try to go on with that chapter, since everything in physics builds on what has gone before, so I skipped to the last two lectures, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I decided that the title of the book, Six Easy Pieces,only applies if you understand physics terminology really well, which I don’t. I recommend that it be renamed Six Sort of Hard Pieces If You Don’t Know What We’re Talking About Here.

In these lectures, Feynman is very good at explaining some basic concepts for those fairly new to physics. For field theory, he uses the analogy of waves in a pool to show how motion in one place affects motion in a distant place. He says that matter goes straight unless acted upon by an external force, but we don't know why; that the earth is pulled toward the sun, as opposed to the earth moving around the sun; and that atoms are always in motion ("jigglings and wigglings of atoms") and that such movement increases with the application of heat.

Feynman stimulates some interesting issues and questions. Under the principle of conservation of energy, the overall amount of energy remains constant; only re-arrangement of energy/atoms occurs. Feynman states that in joining together, atoms "like certain particular partners, certain particular directions, and so on." In this way he explains why atom combinations (attraction) take particular forms and resist being something other than such forms. This 'integrity' at the quantum level suggests a 'social' context where atoms interact with each other for particular 'reasons' and that an 'inner character' lies at the heart of quantum physics, as opposed to randomness. Feynman also writes that atoms "want" and that "It is the job of physics to analyze why each one wants what it wants." "Want" is an interesting choice of words. He defines inertia by saying that "If something is moving, with nothing touching it and completely undisturbed, it will go on forever, coasting at a uniform speed in a straight line. (Why does it keep on coasting? We do not know, but that is the way it is.)" Does the reference to "coasting" mean that a body is passively carried along in space? If so, carried by what, and what is space?

Feynman says we don't really know what energy is, but does it involve a 'power' differential where matter and energy move to states of equilibrium? If this is so, then is this one way that gravity (differences in mass and distance) might have a parallel at the quantum level (weight of atoms as they combine or recombine)? Feynman writes that "all planets push and pull each other." If "pull" is attraction of bodies to each other, it's not clear what push means. For that matter, it's also not clear how "push and pull" relate to Einstein's spacetime curvature (oddly, Feynman discusses Einstein's relativity only briefly). Regarding push-pull (attraction-resistance) Feynman makes some suggestive comments when he states that "the force of electricity between two charged objects looks just like the law of gravitation...." In describing the earth's movement around the sun, Feynman says that the earth impinges "on more particles which are coming from its forward side than from its hind side." Does this mean that the earth "bunches up space" ("particles") as it moves through its orbit and is this related to the earth's gravity? Elsewhere, Feynman states that "the earth can be understood to be round merely because everything attracts everything else and so it has attracted itself together as far as it can!" Gravity is not some (mystical) force at the center of the earth, but a pulling of matter and energy inward, against itself, toward the center.

While this is all fun stuff to think about, these Feynman lectures do not enlighten much a lay person's understanding of the uncertainty principle, annhilation and antimatter, and absolute time. His last lecture on quantum behavior is particularly difficult. Feynman is at his best discussing the role of doubt and uncertainty in science. When he differs with the theories of the past or of his contemporaries, he seems respectful enough, saying that they are not wrong, but "a little wrong" or "incomplete." His footnote at the bottom of p. 59 directly challenges those who say wonder and awe are the province of poetry and religion, not science. He also blends life and non-life together when he says that "'Everything is made of atoms....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.'" This is Feynman at his best, and a good challenge for those attempting to put philosophy on a solid materialistic foundation.