"Even a very small effect sometimes requires profound changes in our ideas" Some words on the nature and philosophy of science. "Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet." "We do not yet know the all the basic laws there is an expanding frontier of ignorance." "This two-year course in physics is presented from the point of view that you, the reader, are going to be a physicist." The book went through many editions and many corrections were made to it. The lectures were given between 19 (before my father was born!). It was planned from the beginning to tape-record the lectures and turn them into a course textbook. Intro about Feynman and the history of publication of these volumes. There are no exercises to help see the implications of the equations and how they play out in practice.įeynman's impressions at the beginning about the book being hard for many people are spot on. While many parts of the book are easy to understand, many other parts are very hard you have got to be a math genius in order to understand them. Style is engaging and author makes hard topics easy to grasp.Īuthor doesn't give us ready formulas as has been done in school he goes through the trouble of explaining how we got them in the first place. The textbook is an introductory for science majors and therefore doesn't require prior reading beyond high school science. It's funny that I'm reading this book while I haven't read any medical textbook in full despite being a doctor!ĭelayed reading it for 2 week ls while I read QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, which was mentioned in the Preface - I might have read all of Feynman's popular science books by this time (all during this year btw). I now find that this paragraph has captured hearts all over the globe and, therefore, it is internationally famous. Let it give us one more final pleasure drink it and forget it all!" How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. There in wine is found the great generalization all life is fermentation. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass and our imagination adds atoms. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. "A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. I picked up the first volume and upon a cursory glance, I happened to read this paragraph, in utter admiration and reverence: There were three attractive red-colored cloth volumes of Lectures in Physics by Richard P. Aloysius' College, Jabalpur, and there I took his permission to look up his personal library. S C Mookerjee, our Professor and Head of Department in Physics at St. He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at Caltech.įour decades ago, I once dared to walk into the office of Mr. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology (creation of devices at the molecular scale). He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. During his lifetime and after his death, Feynman became one of the most publicly known scientists in the world. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga. Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as work in particle physics (he proposed the parton model).
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