Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online

This repository previously included a toolchain to build a collection of eBooks, in ePub and MOBI formats, from Caltech's online edition of the Feynman Lectures. Those scripts have since been removed, in response to the suggestion that their continued availability might lead to a permanent discontinuation of HTML access.

archgoon• 12 years ago

From the landing page:

"However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose."

gordon_freeman2• 12 years ago

a Kindle format would be amazing as I can take it anywhere with my Kindle and learn on the go.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

pandoc will do pretty much exactly that.

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/README.html

gluejar• 12 years ago

here's the story of that: http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-dmca-takedown-...

sb057• 12 years ago

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/buy.html

josealicarte• 12 years ago

Great lecture, this very useful :) to all fresher

leephillips• 12 years ago

These books show more than anything else why Feynman is so revered among physicists as a teacher. An introductory course in physics, simple yet demanding, and shot through with Feynman's unique approach and personality.

gordon_freeman2• 12 years ago

this is obviously a great news for Physics lovers like myself. I have been always intrigued and fascinated by Physics and unfortunately did not able to pursue it as my career but having free access to Feynman's lectures would definitely ignite passion in me and lot of others who are interested in subject.

judk2• 12 years ago

Feynman actually found that the lectures kind of flopped as a semesters courses. It was too intense, IIRC.

NamTaf2• 12 years ago

That's correct. Having said that, they're a fantastic refresher for someone who has studied all of this at the high school / university level and wants to get a crash course. Feynmann loved his technical crash courses and these lectures show that he has a mastery of distilling out all of the details and leaving none of the chaff.

ingenter• 12 years ago

Feynman lectures on QED:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvl6TBGEoO0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjdbbnWsdis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF25Lwt73fg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtK6FdTg9HU

danesparza• 12 years ago

I have to disable safety mode to watch these? WTF?

teraflop• 12 years ago

I don't know what "safety mode" is, but I didn't need to disable anything to watch the videos.

jasonkostempski• 12 years ago

Physics is a dangerous thing.

differentView• 12 years ago

Feynman is known to enjoy looking at titties while working, just warning the prudes.

cjrd• 12 years ago

Wow - this is awesome. Anybody interested in helping me map out a dependency graph of the concepts in the Feynman Lectures?

adamfeldman• 12 years ago

If you did that it'd be super awesome. Maybe something like http://www.metacademy.org/about but for physics?

mathteacher1729• 12 years ago

Probably not exactly the dependency map you are looking for, but perhaps still very useful. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hph.html

allegory4• 12 years ago

Wonderful news but particularly sickening for me as I fished out £130 for the hardback volumes last year!

Absolutely great books however!

I've learned a lot already from those books.

Also, the "For the Practical Man" (algebra, geometry, trig, arithemtic) series of books on mathematics that Feynman started his career with. They are hard to get hold of and expensive but the calculus book is wonderful if incredibly dense and written in an early 1900's style!

Those, a cheap Casio calculator, a box of pencils and some school exercise books have taught me more than a university degree and years of industry experience.

Edit: found a legitimate PDF of "Calculus for the practical man" http://physsocyork.co.uk/notes/J.%20E.%20Thopmson--Calculus%...

NamTaf2• 12 years ago

I do not regret buying the hardcover copies for one second. I prefer reading stuff ilke this on paper - digital makes a good reference for quick checking of facts but I get a better, deeper understanding of it when I sit down and read it on paper at a desk.

rdxm• 12 years ago

every now and then i go into the library and read a chapter out of my hardcover set of these. my kids do the "geeez dad" thing when i make them sit with me and look at them.

classics.. to be sure....

edit: i almost feel like these shouldn't be something that gets digitized.....this knowledge and its presentation belongs in a tactile medium...

allegory4• 12 years ago

Agree with this.

Also if I get into a book, I always end up buying the thing as I don't want any electronic distractions taking away from it.

k-mcgrady2• 12 years ago

> "I don't want any electronic distractions taking away from it"

Reading on Kindle is pretty distraction free I find.

HCIdivision172• 12 years ago

To be sure, I too prefer a book. But there are plenty of times I would love the option to reference a book at an inconvenient time (like when I'm at work 50 miles away). Having a low fidelity option is preferable over none at all in these cases.

Someday we'll have an honest-to-god book with e-ink, which will reconfigure itself to whatever we want to read and get the best of both worlds. (PopSci promised me this more than a decade ago and I'm bitter it hasn't happened yet!)

gone35• 12 years ago

The plural of anecdote is data, so FWIW I'm exactly the opposite: not just for textbooks, but even for hardcover literature books I have right there in my bookshelf, I often end up digging up some PDF or Google Books version regardless. I guess I miss the scrolling/zooming, plus all the meta-textual, cross-referencing stuff like having multiple copies of the book in different sections side by side, easy access to references and definitions, etc.

What one finds 'classical' is highly relative: remember Socrates famously despised books as a degrading and pernicious medium, for one [1].

[1] http://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/

sabbatic13• 12 years ago

Socrates' ideas, or rather Plato's representations thereof, belong to a cultural context radically different from our own and have absolutely no relevance. Greece was undergoing a transition from orality to literacy at the time. It was also in the early stages of actual educational institutions. What the distribution of a few manuscripts in that context meant relates to nothing in our modern world.

Not to be a jerk about it, but the misuse of history is characteristic of very pernicious rhetoric.

k-mcgrady2• 12 years ago

Is this worth reading for someone without a particular need to understand physics in depth? What I mean is if I take the time to read these will I learn anything useful to someone not pursuing a career in physics or related field?

lutusp• 12 years ago

Is this worth reading for someone without a particular need to understand physics in depth?

For someone just curious about modern physics, without any specialized knowledge or advanced mathematical skill, it might be overwhelming.

HCIdivision172• 12 years ago

I suspect many of us would say yes. One of the things Feynman was known for was his knack for bringing ideas down to earth.

As he opens in QED, you won't be able to solve heavy physics problems analytically in a short period of time, but with a little effort, you'll certainly be able to qualitatively understand the situation. And there's quite a lot of beauty to have there, even without heavy math (but there will be math!)

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Yes, it is especially useful as they are vary approachable. That said they are also as deep as any 3 semester course in physics you're likely to take so at some point you will need the math skills to keep up.

rwallace• 12 years ago

The honest answer is, unless your profession is in the physical sciences or hardware engineering, learning physics from this or other sources will probably not be useful.

Whether it's worthwhile is to at least some extent a value judgment, and also as I see it, depends to some extent on what else you would have done with the time. If you have a block of time allocated for work, and you're thinking of spending it reading about physics instead of reading documentation on something you do actually need, that's probably suboptimal. If you've finished work for the day, you have a block of time allocated for intellectual leisure and you're trying to decide between reading about physics versus, say, the latest Dungeons & Dragons rules, in my opinion the former is more worthwhile.

lovelearning• 12 years ago

I feel quantum computing will become a critical field, starting a decade or so from now.

Since it's still in its infancy, higher level abstractions won't be engineered for atleast another 2-3 decades.

So the first few engineers who get into it - even software engineers - will have to grapple with fundamental quantum mechanical concepts, in the same way computer engineers in the 1940s-60s had to grapple with fundamental electrical engineering concepts.

Feynman's Volume 3 is an especially useful introduction to these fundamental concepts, and I feel a good investment for the future.

abecedarius• 12 years ago

I don't know about useful -- physics is not currently as useful to a programmer as, say, probability theory -- but I'd recommend volume 1 to anyone ready to follow it, just for the mind-stretching. Volume 2 is longer, harder, and less different in its approach to its main topic, electromagnetism. Volume 3 is short, unique, and doesn't depend too much on Volume 2 -- I was able to profit from it without mastering volume 2. (Nowadays there probably are better intros to quantum mechanics, though. I don't think there was any one really good intro when I studied it back in the 80s. The most enlightening were Feynman vol. 3, Dirac's Principles, and another whose authors I've forgotten.)

Added: There's only one other introductory physics text by a historically first-rank physicist, and that was Maxwell in the 19th century. (Maybe there were earlier ones, like Euler's books on mechanics, which I haven't read. Einstein's Relativity was a popularization like Feynman's QED or The Character of Physical Law rather than like the Feynman lectures. Newton's Principia has also been used as an intro text, which seems hilariously inappropriate.) The lectures are also unusually full of the this-is-how-a-physicist-thinks thing which is hard to pin down.

paulvs2• 12 years ago

Just chapter 1 contains answers to many questions that I've had on the back of my mind.. Why does water ice expand when it melts? If water ice is a crystalline structure, how can it vary in temperature (e.g. -5 degrees to -10 degrees). A very good read.

yequalsx• 12 years ago

Perhaps you misspoke or I'm not understanding correctly what you mean but from the book:

"Another thing we can see from Fig. 1–4 is why ice shrinks when it melts. The particular crystal pattern of ice shown here has many “holes” in it, as does the true ice structure. When the organization breaks down, these holes can be occupied by molecules. Most simple substances, with the exception of water and type metal, expand upon melting, because the atoms are closely packed in the solid crystal and upon melting need more room to jiggle around, but an open structure collapses, as in the case of water."

paulvs2• 12 years ago

I misspoke, I meant shrinks.. thanks for the heads up.

madengr3• 12 years ago

Don't forget the audio is out there too!

Shizka2• 12 years ago

Is it actually possible to learn this through audio? With equations and so forth I would imagine it being rather hard. Do you have any experience with it?

madengr3• 12 years ago

Yes I have the audio. No, it is no substitute for the book. The audio is of the lectures. The books are based on the lectures. It's just nice to have the audio to go along so you can hear his personality.

rodrigoavie• 12 years ago

Thanks for the material. Anyone working towards translating the material?

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

Great! This part kind of surprises me though:

However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose.

I know it doesn't actually mean anything in practice, but still, I'm shaking my head in disbelief that there's still people out there clinging to this mentality. Aside from the fact that it's fundamentally technically impossible to read something online without downloading it first.

_djhrtmn• 12 years ago

Yes, but isn't that basically the same thing as most streaming services? Netflix? To me, 'clinging' makes it sound like the idea has gone away.

panzi• 12 years ago

Lawmakers redefined the meaning of download to "download and permanently store". They don't see "download and only hold in application cache for a limited time" as download.

adrianN• 12 years ago

Unless it's child porn, I think.

0003• 12 years ago

So we cannot not scrape this to see how many words are in each chapter, how the technical vocabulary changes over topics, or perform an analysis on connected keywords...

PudgePacket• 12 years ago

Well, If you're going on the definition of download as mentioned above you could write a javascript program to do it and run it on the webpages while they're still in browser.

syllogism• 12 years ago

I was thinking of making up vocabulary lists, and creating a "learn physics in English" course.

Guess not...

kabdib• 12 years ago

I'd love to buy the PDFs, but they're DRMed and I refuse to rent ebooks.

I guess I could buy them and then download the "pirate" versions from somewhere.

Instead, I'll stick with my hardcopy edition.

jayvanguard• 12 years ago

It is awesome how while the page is loading you see stuff like this:

"Now if we multiply Eq. (41.19) by [math], [math]. We want the time average of [math], so let us take the average of the whole equation, and study the three terms. Now what about [math] times the force?"

Soo... am I going to need math skills to understand this stuff?

TylerE• 12 years ago

Yes. Calculus was basically invented to solve physics problems.

gamesbrainiac• 12 years ago

Honestly, I feel that Calc should be taught way earlier, the way that physics is taught in school feels rather incomplete. I mean without calculus, is quite difficult to understand physics.

foobarqux2• 12 years ago

How does this compare to Susskind's "The Theoretical Minimum"?

DennisP2• 12 years ago

Susskind's is much shorter and goes into very little detail. It's really intended to give you a foundation for learning physics, while Feynmann's is meant to teach you lots of physics.

foobarqux2• 12 years ago

Does that apply to Susskind's video lectures as well?

bkcooper2• 12 years ago

The Feynman lectures certainly will teach you a lot, but I think it would be a fairly trying textbook for learning a lot of the material for the first time. Among other things, a very serious deficiency for self-education is a complete lack of problems to work (which just reflects that these really were lectures).

dominotw• 12 years ago

Has anyone completed all of the 3 parts? How much time did it take you ?

acomar• 12 years ago

It's generally a three semester to a full two year sequence at most universities. You can of course go faster or slower depending on your own capacity to self-study and learn, but most bright people will probably fall somewhere in that spread to get a solid grasp of the total contents.

That said, it's always helpful at first to skim through and get a surface understanding of the whole picture before you dive in and try to understand it all. You can probably complete a surface scan like that in a few weeks or months. I studied these becomes along with my high school physics course and completed the books in about a year, but I was spending double the usual amount of time on this stuff. As a high school student, I didn't have anything better to do, but as an adult I'd expect it to take me two dedicated years.

gourneau• 12 years ago

Project Tuva has a great series of lectures Feynman gave around that time http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/

metaobject• 12 years ago

Silverlight only. Too bad MS cares more about pushing their proprietary technology than sharing important historical / educational material.

3rd3• 12 years ago

One of the rare cases of "internet done right".

nirai• 12 years ago

An offline version of the website is still floating around the Internet space.

Feynman Lectures on Physics now free online

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