My brother the magpie sent me this old clip of Richard Feynman explaining that explaining why magnets repel or attract each other is not at all a simple matter:
I saw this aeons ago, and had forgotten it, and am very glad to reencounter it.
Because 2020, I can’t help hearing our current predicament in Feynman’s discussion of the vast substructure of shared knowledge required to make even simple communication possible. A big part of the Trumpist take over of the GOP–and much of America–has turned on destroying even the possibility of am agreed baseline for reality.
In Feynman’s metaphor, it is as if half of the country are aliens, and have no idea what, say, “shall” means in the sentence, “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”
So there’s that: we’re living with Vogons.
But this is supposed to be a respite–so just enjoy the listening for a few minutes of very smart talk. It’s a relief, or at least it is so for me, to be asked to think in the company of a virtuoso at that craft.
ETA: I should add: Feynman was a very smart guy, but not an exemplary one, in particular in ways that also bear on 2020. His treatment of women as documented in his own memoirs was awful–and his doing so as a Caltech professor created conditions in which female students would have had no doubt about their status and function in the mind of the most famous star in the department.
Elite science as an enterprise has long had this problem. In the last few years some of the most egregious of the misogyny and abuse has been exposed, but the job is very far from done. Which means that the above isn’t intended to celebrate Feynman as an avatar of reason. Take what he says for what it is: an elegant, accessible bit of teaching (his reputation turns almost as much on his being one of the legendary teachers of physics as on his genuinely important contributions to physics itself), and do not see the whole of the artist in his art.
Back to your regularly scheduled programming:
Image: Raphael, School of Athens, 1511
Fraud Guy
Vogons? I didn’t like their prose, and now you tell me they do poetry? UGH!!!
Baud
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
Another Scott
Feynman was a master at explaining physics. His little book on QED is a revelation.
Speaking of rich monsters destroying the commonweal, ProPublica on public beach loss in Hawaii:
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
@Baud: Details are available at https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/. Volume II, chapters 34-37.
Chetan Murthy
I think it was Feynman who said that his criterion for whether we understand something, is whether he can explain it to a high school student. Maybe he said sixth grader: I forget. But it was a really, really high bar.
Virginia
Such a wonderful painting. There is so much going on.
West of the Rockies
Curiously, this is the first time I’ve heard Feynman’s voice. I had read Surely, You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, but never encountered an interview. I was surprised by that NY (Brooklyn?) accent. I wonder how he and Oppenheimer got on. Feynman strikes me as prickly.
Alison Rose
That was honestly fascinating, thank you for sharing! Small world, too–just yesterday, my mom and I were talking about some notable alumni (as they’re termed on Wikipedia) from her high school, Far Rockaway HS, and Feynman was the first one she mentioned. (Not at the same time, obvs, he was born 3 decades before her.)
Bernie Madoff went there, too. Slightly less illustrious.
Alison Rose
@Baud: Literally the first thing that came to mind. We are all susceptible to Juggaloism, I suppose.
arrieve
It turns out I needed a little Feynman — his obvious delight in questioning how things work and refusal to dumb down his answers seems even more remarkable these days. I think I’ll go find some more videos.
CaseyL
Feynman’s gift was being able to explain abstruse subjects by referencing things people might already be familiar with, and demonstrating when possible (like when he dunked the O-ring in ice water).
Roger Moore
@Alison Rose:
I’m two steps removed from Feynman. A friend of mine grew up down the street from him and carpooled to school with his (and Murray Gel-Mann’s) son.
Alison Rose
@Roger Moore: Dang, if I had a friend with a dad like that, I’d be that dork who just wanted to hang out with the parents instead of playing with the kids when I came over.
raven
@Alison Rose: I’d like to hang out with your dad! I was probably in the same place as him at sometime!
frosty
@Roger Moore: I’m an academic grandson of Feynman. One of my physics profs was a student of his.
Tom Levenson
@Roger Moore: Never met Feynman, myself. Did meet Gell-Mann. Asked him a dumb question as a middle schooler a couple-three years after his Nobel, and then, ~15 years later, had a bit of conversation with him as a young science journalist. Nice man, at least to me. (I don’t believe he suffered fools gladly, and I was surely a fool both times, but he was kind enough in brief encounters.)
Uncle Cosmo
@Chetan Murthy: When I was a physics major** I heard that sort of statement attributed to an unnamed French mathematician or physicist*** living about the time of the Revolution – that he never felt he understood a result unless he could walk out into the street & stop the first passerby & explain it to him in a way he could understand.
** Back when “best by” dates on canned goods were in Roman numerals…or maybe cuneiform, I forget…
***One of the La’s, or maybe Le’s…
different-church-lady
VOGON CAPTAIN: “So what you’re saying is that I
write poetryvote for Trump because underneath my mean callous heartless exterior I really just want to be…lovedunderstood. Is that right?'”FORD: “Well, ummm… I mean yes! Don’t we all, deep down…”
VOGON CAPTAIN: “Wrong! You’re completely wrong! I just vote for Trump to throw my mean callous heartless exterior into sharp relief!”
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore: But what’s your Erdos number?
VeniceRiley
Didn’t Caltech release Fenyman’s physics lectures for free a few years back? I had a friend say they helped her not fail out of physics at Bryn Mawr.
Cameron
And life goes on. https://www.newser.com/story/300584/fox-hunt-crashes-through-funeral.html
different-church-lady
Also: that’s a lot of words to say children reliably figure out you can respond to any answer with “Why?”
Another Scott
Your ETA is a good one. Physics as a field of inquiry has been especially bad to girls and women as students and as professionals. It’s a huge blot on the field.
My J could give many, many examples… :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@frosty:
I think to count as someone’s academic progeny you have to have had them as a thesis advisor, not just as a prof in some class.
Kent
As a HS physics teacher I have a bunch of these sorts of physics videos bookmarked for use in class.
My favorite is actually famous former MIT Physics professor Walter Lewan who has a bunch of MIT Physics 101 lectures on YouTube. The best one is his classic lecture on the science of rainbows. He has mad chalkboard skills.
https://youtu.be/iKUSWJWMSk4
Roger Moore
@different-church-lady:
I probably have an Erdos number, but it’s relatively high. I’ve only published in chemistry and biology, so none of my coauthors have low Erdos numbers.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent: Anybody here take E&M with F. Barry Dunning at Rice ? This was in the mid-80s. Man, that guy had *mad* chalkboard skillz. We used to count ’em during the one-hour lecture and I remember some impressive totals. Maybe …. 40+ full boards? The man was a demon. Also, excellent teacher. Eeeeexxcellent teacher.
Poe Larity
If magnets really worked, we’d have fusion already.
Particularly confusing since some flat earthers think satellites stay in space by magnetism.
Miss Bianca
@Cameron: Oh, my God. See, I’d actually try to *arrange* for a fox hunt to crash my funeral, if I could
Note to self: Have to arrange to die sometime between September and the end of March…
prostratedragon
@VeniceRiley: I had a similar experience to your friend. Mulling over Feynman’s lectures on Maxwell’s equations made Resnick and Halliday problems much easier to break down and I wound up doing ok.
dmsilev
Yeah, there’s a lot of truth to this. A couple of years ago, we had a celebration of the centennial of Feynman’s birth, and while most of that was a celebration, it was gratifying (maybe not the right word) to see that his less-exemplary aspects were also mentioned.
pamelabrown53
@Cameron:
I’ll be damned. Besides being a weird story, I thought fox hunts were banned in the UK?!
cmorenc
@Another Scott:
The counter-productive destructive effects of hardened seawalls on the rest of a beach is even more dramatic on the barrier islands along the east coast of the US, since these islands are essentially just big piles of sand unsecured by any bedrock near the surface, and easily eroded by ocean currents and wave energy. What essentially happens is the wave energy gets deflected by the seawall, and re-focuses (and amplifies) the energy from the wave action on the adjacent unprotected beachfront on either side of the seawall – causing accelerated erosion at & past both ends of it. This effect is easy to see after a tropical storm at the ocean-ward end of public access boardwalks out to a beach, which typically cross the oceanfront dune line and end in a set of steps or ramps to descend to beach level. The dune will be significantly eroded back 10-15 ft adjacent to either side of the staircase or ramp, because the hard stair structure thus deflects and concentrates wave energy and currents to either side.
dmsilev
@Baud:
Because Quantum.
(in the video, Feynman mentions “all the spins of the iron atoms line up”. Following his theme, _why_ do they all line up? Because of quantum mechanics and the various rules that we’ve managed to figure out about how atoms and their parts work)
dmsilev
@VeniceRiley:
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu
They’re all there for the reading.
Raven
Sister Golden Bear
Obligatory Insane Clown Posse reference. (NSFW language)
Alison Rose
@raven: Are you recalling things I’ve said in the past about his time with GD, or are you mixing me up with another commenter? :)
different-church-lady
@Poe Larity: That’s idiotic! Satellites stay in space by centrifugal force!
Another Scott
@Poe Larity: They’re getting closer!!
100M degrees for 20 seconds in Korea:
Won’t be long! Another 30-50 years for sure this time!!
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
Is that like the science that proves it is impossible for bumble bees to fly?
Roger Moore
@Kent:
I don’t know if it’s the same kind of mad chalkboard skills, but I had one professor who was absolutely amazing in his use of chalkboards. He taught in one of those old-style lecture halls with 9 chalk boards in three tiers of three boards, and he had all his lectures prepared to exactly fill the chalkboards in the lecture hall.
His most amazing trick was when working out an equation. He would draw a vertical line down the chalkboard, not exactly in the middle but off to the side a bit. Then he’d write in the equation, and it would fit neatly on the wider side of the board. He’d do a series of manipulations, and when he got to the bottom of the board, the equation would simplify so it would fit on the narrower side. He did this so often it couldn’t be a coincidence; he had it planned down to that degree of precision.
pamelabrown53
@Raven:
So, what’s the purpose of a “groin”? Is it about delineating private property?
SiubhanDuinne
@Miss Bianca:
:-)
Edmund Dantes
@different-church-lady: it’s a famous aspect of Lean Six Sigma. It’s called 5 why’s. And even gets explained as pretend you are a kid pestering their parent as to “why”.
Chetan Murthy
@pamelabrown53:
Wyatt Salamanca
My favorite painting! You just made my week with that choice. Thanks for sharing this masterpiece with the BJ community and for all the other amazing paintings you include in your posts. You truly have impeccable taste.
Have a Happy, Healthy and Appropriately Socially Distanced New Year!
Brachiator
@Chetan Murthy:
Carl Sagan was derided by some of his colleagues for (gasp) popularizing science. A few even claimed, falsely, that the amount of papers he published declined precipitously when he became popular.
Some folks just like to high-priest the shit out of everything.
There are a lot of little Feynman nuggets on YouTube, often very fascinating and illuminating.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: I had a prof in grad school who was like that. Smaller classroom, but with boards wrapping around a corner so filling two walls. He filled all of the boards exactly once over the course of each lecture, very very consistently. Apparently part of it was that he really hated to write on an erased board, so he insisted that the custodial staff wash the board before his lecture and then didn’t erase anything.
This is the same guy who gave a test in which class average was roughly 150 points out of 600, and then the one of my classmates who truly understood him got a 599 with “one point deducted for lack of elegance”. Yeah, prof was kind of a jerk.
Roger Moore
@Edmund Dantes:
5 whys is an important part of all kinds of quality systems. We use it in my lab when we’re doing root cause failure analyses, and it’s actually frustrating when I encounter someone else doing a root cause analysis who fails to use it. We recently had a problem where out IT department screwed up one of our computers, and we demanded they send us their analysis of what had gone wrong so we could include it in our investigation. They had looked only at proximate causes and hadn’t tried digging deeper, as 5 whys teaches you to do. It was pretty clear why they hadn’t, too: their failure was a result of bad policy decisions by higher ups*, and digging too deep would point fingers in a direction they didn’t want them pointed.
*Mostly a lack of resources to test their stuff before rolling it out to the whole institution.
Frank Wilhoit
I can no longer bear to watch and listen to Feynman because it only rubs my nose in the total destruction of the American educational system. I taught in the undergrad classroom (music theory and history) from 1981 to 1987. With each passing year, the incoming freshmen were less and less well prepared; by the end, a substantial portion of them knew, as far as could be discovered, nothing — not just about their chosen subject, but about anything at all.
At one school, I was essentially forbidden to flunk anybody for any reason; at another, I was given binding numerical targets of how many freshmen to wash out at the end of each quarter — and was sharply questioned for exceeding those quotas when some students simply disappeared without dropping the courses (missing the final without notice was an automatic fail, per the handbook).
Feynman could not (and would not) have functioned in an environment like that.
Roger Moore
@Frank Wilhoit:
Feynman was personally insulated from that kind of problem by teaching at Caltech. Obviously, highly selective schools like that still have the kinds of students who haven’t been let down by our educational system. Professors there are not given any kind of quota of students to pass or fail and are given enormous latitude about how they want to teach their classes, even in core classes like Phys1 and Phys2, which he famously liked to teach.
pamelabrown53
@Chetan Murthy:
Thanks. Should have taken the initiative to research it myself. Funny thing, while I was reading your description I immediately was transported to Lake Erie as a child. We kids would scramble on the boulders and I bet they were groins.
dm
Maybe his feet weren’t entirely of clay. Feynman took a stint outside of Caltech in the late 80s at a small computer company in Cambridge where his son worked. After he died, this aspect of his personality came up in a conversation and one of the young women reminisced, “Yes, he’d ask me to refill his coffee cup, but when he explained quantum mechanics to me I felt like I was being taken seriously.”
But that was just one woman’s testimony (and she wasn’t one of the scientists among the women on the staff, whose experience may have been different), for balance to this story, dmsilev @31 mentions that this issue got more coverage at the centennial.
jl
@Chetan Murthy: ” I think it was Feynman who said that his criterion for whether we understand something, is whether he can explain it to a high school student. ”
A bigshot mathematician said the same thing to me in grad school. He added that if you can’t explain something to an audience of average intelligence that could get out of HS, it wasn’t their problem, it was your problem, and you need to ask yourself if you really understand what you are talking about.
Doing that can be hard, I admit. But I teach economics and statistics to a variety of professional students, as well as grad students, so I’ve had to at least try in order to keep my job. Professional students can be hard bunch, since they often want a series of bottom lines, rules of thumbs, and shortcuts. They got practical shit to get done, dammitall.
jl
@dm: I read a short biography of Feynman a long time ago. I think he never recovered from his first wife’s death, and had problems dealing with that for the rest of his life. It might explain his odd. often retrograde even for his own time, and erratic attitudes towards women later on.
Edit: I remember a quote that went, more or less, that he couldn’t believe he could discover such love and admiration for another person, and could never believe that he lost it when she died. He had an anecdote that when the docs gave him the time of death (he was at work when she went into a crisis and couldn’t make it back in time), the clock on the wall stopped at that same time. Being a physicist, he was not supposed to believe in spooky stuff, but wondered why he spent so much time trying to explain it to himself ever since her death.
Haroldo
@prostratedragon:
Yeah, but what about Jackson…..?
Kent
I find this sort of “get off my lawn…the kids these days are ignorant and no good” to be tiresome and utterly inaccurate.
I went to HS in Eugene Oregon from 1978-1982 and I teach HS science today at a somewhat more affluent but otherwise similar school to what I attended. The kids I have in class today are higher preforming in just about every way from those I went to school with 40 years ago. Back then we had barely one section of each AP science class. Today with a slightly larger school (1600 vs 2100) we have 5+ sections of each AP science. And at least the top 25% or so are truly busting their butts compared to the cohort I went to school with.
If you want to talk about music, my daughter’s HS jazz band is an order of magnitude beyond anything we were doing in HS band in the 1980s. It is night and day.
Honestly, the kids are mostly all right. If anything, it is the boomers today that are the problem.
John Revolta
@Frank Wilhoit: Feynman spent some time teaching in South America (where he became a member of a well- known marching band) where they wanted to adopt USA-type teaching methods. He quickly dicovered that what they were doing was rote learning, where the students could parrot information out of their texts but had no understanding of what it meant. In other words, “teaching to the test”. Don’t think he’d be happy working in our present-day schools.
jl
@Haroldo: Besides being able to give deep intuition that didn’t lead you astray when you got to more advanced formalities, Feynman knew how to motivate a desire to understand, set up a suspense story and get you interested in the punch line.
I remember his intro to the explanation of the optics of compound insect eyes, paraphrasing: the way bugs see is going to seem really clunky and dumb, but look, they’re little and they have their own problems to solve
Edit: and he followed up, by repeatedly comparing and contrasting insect problems to human problems and why the physics of insect sight had to be different from ours. He made it interesting, when I was prepared to slog through it, counting the pages left to go.
Haroldo
@jl:
It’s that deep, physical intuition that is key, I agree.
raven
@Alison Rose: Dead
Pawprint
This was a delight to hear again. In my younger years I had the good fortune to live next door to Dick Feyman. Yeah, he was neither totally admirable nor especially easy, but he was, I believe, the smartest person I have ever known. I remember hearing his son (a little boy at the time) ask him why the sky is blue, listening to him start with the wavelengths of the elements involved and go from there. I wouldn’t have called him a friend (not that close), but I’m glad to have known him.
jl
@Haroldo: Feynman said he learned that from Fermi and people should look there for really good examples.
I stink at chemistry and just learned enough physics to understand some principles that I need to, so I never did. Stagger through what I need from Feynman and stop there.
Feynman wasn’t afraid to make fun of himself. IIRC, he didn’t bother to check what language they spoke in Brazil, and learned some basic Spanish instead of Portuguese. He discovered his mistake on his first try to speak when he got off the plane.
Also, on how he got the reputation for being a genius during the Manhattan Project. He got completely lost while listening to engineers describe a new lab. So he asked a random leading question to try to get them to fill him in while saving face, and he’d inadvertently pointed out a mistake in the design.
raven
@pamelabrown53:
A groin field along Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Trapping of sand on the updrift side of a groin, and erosion of the beach on the downdrift side usually results in a sawtooth pattern to the beach. Note that in this example the beach is the same width on both sides of each groin, indicating little or no longshore transport of sand.
jl
@Pawprint: It strikes me that in clips I’ve seen that when he is answering questions, sometimes he seems very cheerful and enthusiastic in an easy going way. Other times he seems very intense, and almost infuriated with himself, or the questioner, or the nature of existence, that he can’t explain things as thoroughly as he wants.
Jay
Apparently the Space Farce Uniforms are out,
stolen directly from the Nazi-erotic Starship Troopers.
Roger Moore
@jl:
That’s not the way I remember that anecdote. I think he included it in Surely You’re Joking. He at first thought it was an eerie coincidence that the clock had stopped at the exact time of his wife’s death, but then he thought it through. The clock had belonged to his wife, and was one of the ones with the numbers that physically flip to show the time. It was mechanically unreliable and prone to stopping. He concluded that the doctor had probably picked it up to look at it when recording the time of death, and that was enough to cause it to stop. The upshot of the story was that he was too much of a hard-headed empiricist to stick with a mystical explanation and had to find a mundane physical one.
Haroldo
@jl:
I just discovered this online.
‘Everything I know in life, I learned from Jackson
It, I think, argues that a proper approach to those mathematical formalities can tease out not only physical intuition, but can provide the student with a way of life, a Tao. And, in retrospect, the writer’s not half wrong.
jl
@Roger Moore: I’m thinking of an interview clip I saw where he talked about his first wife.
Edit: I don’t remember whether him discussing his long term difficult emotional reaction to her death was in the book.
Roger Moore
@Jay:
The one interesting, and IMO good, thing I can see about the Space Force uniforms is that the officer and enlisted uniforms seem to be essentially identical. Enlisted ranks are indicated on the sleeve, while officers have shoulder boards, and officers have a little emblem near their cuff, but otherwise they look like the same uniform.
Haroldo
@jl:
All this plus bongos.
(I stunk at basic chem, but could kinda feel my way around p-chem. I had the good fortune to work with people for whom p-chem was almost mother’s milk.)
Haroldo
A duplicate.
Uncle Cosmo
8^O Jeebus Frackin’ Cripes, The Green Monster! Bane of my existence & centerpiece of my dissolution during my one year as an astrophysics grad student.
jl
@Roger Moore: ” the officer and enlisted uniforms seem to be essentially identical. ”
Trump intervened to make them cheaper to produce, so his buddy who owned the factory could get a bigger margin? That’s my hunch.
I agree its a good idea, and maybe a Trumpster blind squirrel and acorn deal.
raven
@Roger Moore: When you are in the field the uniform is the same for officers and em in the Army and the Corps.
Alison Rose
@raven: Ah yes. Well, if you were at a show on the West coast (or various other places, though he didn’t go on the full tours constantly) anytime from 1970 to 1978…yes, you were likely in his vicinity :)
Haroldo
@Jay:
Yep. They’d fit right in with a remake of The Night Porter.
Mike in NC
@jl: Hideous. Did Melania or Ivanka design them?
Frank McCormick
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that we never really know why things work, we just develop better and more refined descriptions of how they work.
Amir Khalid
@Roger Moore:
Richard Feynman and Merray Gell-Mann had a son together?
BigJimSlade
@different-church-lady: Good lord, I’ve read xkcd for years, and never heard of EXPLAINxkcd.com!
Feathers
Here is a Twitter thread on building offshore electrified reefs to protect beaches and create fish habitat. While not fucking with surfing. https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1339993626609410048
@Jay: my favorite reaction was a complaint about the Trump administration not hiring gays.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, it is a high bar, but keep in mind, the goal isn’t to explain the deep down mathematics – it’s to explain what those mathematics *mean*, in real world terms.
His first lecture brings a lot of information about how atomic theory (“stuff is made of atoms”) tells us a bunch of things, including the ideal gas law, e.g., “so you can see if you have twice the number of atoms, moving at the same average speed, you’ll have twice as many collisions with the container, and thus, twice the pressure.”
That’s just a *great* way of explaining it, so all the rest of the math makes sense once you realize that it’s just saying the same thing.
It can also be an amazing discovery when you realize that all math is, is a language add-on for saying things more quickly and precisely. Alas, since math builds on itself, it doesn’t mean higher math is easily understood – but it does give you a hope of finding a human explanation for some difficult concepts, by unwinding each layer of math.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
I’ve always appreciated Feynman. In terms of techies and women I’ve had a different experience. I started my career at Kodak where we invented digital imaging. The big brains that ran the place recruited and promoted many brilliant women. My wife was one of them. She was a process engineer, promoted to operations manager while a single to be parent. We finally married and she gave birth the same night. She went on to two other engineering positions before she decided to be an interpreter at an historical museum, then a basket maker, selling a couple specialty baskets to the Smithsonian. When I ended my career there, half the most respected engineers were women. It was a great place to work.
Procopius
@Kent: You remind me that when I was in high school I read that the scribe of an Egyptian papyrus on mathematics (I think it was the Rhynd Papyrus) had commented that the young people of his day had none of the virtues of his generation; they were rude, disrespectful of their elders, ignorant, and lazy. Sometime later I read that a Sumerian clay tablet had been found that recorded a payment of two barrels of beer to a teacher for giving the merchant’s son a passing grade. I don’t think people have changed much over the few millennia we know about.
dnfree
@Another Scott: when I was a physics minor at a state university in the 1960s, the only other young woman in my class, a major, and I figured out that we had to be lab partners. Otherwise, our male lab partners would just turn us into errand-runners. We got to go get the potentiometer while they out the circuit together.
bjacques
@Chetan Murthy: very late to the thread, but I do remember Dunning and trying to take notes fast enough drove me crazy! We were probably in the same class, if you remember a female student with a distinctive sneeze.
smedley the uncertain
@Raven: A sea wall and a breakwall/breakwater are not the same thing. Sea walls protect the shore from erosion. Break walls are offshore artifacts that impede the offshore surge before it reaches the shore. Each have different affects on the shore.
Matt McIrvin
If somebody asked me that, I’d be tempted to say “there’s a magnetic field in there, pushing back.” And so there is. But I couldn’t do that if Feynman were in the room, because he’d rightly point out that I’d explained nothing–it’s like the character in Molière who explains that opium puts you to sleep because it possesses a dormitive virtue.
raven
@smedley the uncertain: I never said they were the same.
Matt McIrvin
@Uncle Cosmo: Green? Hmm, my copy had a maroon cover.
I’ve heard the more recent editions are in SI units instead of Gaussian cgs. Not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, the factors of 4pi are in the right place; on the other hand, all those terrible epsilons and mus…
Matt McIrvin
@Poe Larity: The one I’ve heard is that satellites don’t exist at all–the conspiracy is telling you they’re satellites, but what they really are is solar-powered electric robot aircraft that circle endlessly in the upper atmosphere. (NASA has experimented with such things.)
That’s amusing to me in part because I know the technology required to do that is actually much more recent than artificial satellites. Nobody could have made those solar airplanes in the 1960s!
Matt McIrvin
@VeniceRiley: They did! The Feynman Lectures are here, though they’re careful to say they only authorize reading them in a browser, not doing anything else with the text.
My parents bought me a copy of these when I was a young teenager interested in physics. I remember finding them rough going and not opening the books again for many years–and my parents were a bit chagrined at that, because the books were pretty expensive. I didn’t even read them when I was an undergrad majoring in physics.
But on a whim I took them to graduate school with me, and I suddenly found them extremely useful there! It turns out that the Feynman Lectures are the perfect review of undergrad physics for a confused first- or second-year graduate student. The best thing about them is that they approach most subjects in an eccentric way that sounds nothing like the way you probably learned them, so if you can figure out how Feynman’s way and the way in your other textbooks could both be true, you end up understanding a lot.
(The exception, I found, was special relativity–the Feynman Lectures’ treatment of that is disappointingly old-hat and seems musty next to, say, Taylor and Wheeler. Just about everything else, though. Especially his approach to teaching quantum mechanics, which is famously radical.)
Kent
@Procopius:
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
–Socrates
smedley the uncertain
@raven: Ok
Matt McIrvin
@dmsilev:
I was just reading an old article by John Baez quoting a passage from Feynman’s lectures in which Feynman proves, very succinctly, that you cannot get bulk magnetism of materials from purely classical mechanics of particles. (The reason is essentially that the Lorentz force is always perpendicular to the direction of motion of a charged particle, so it can’t affect the energy that appears in thermodynamic distributions, so it can’t have any effect in thermal equilibrium.) The magnetism of a magnet is necessarily quantum!
cope
@Kent: My HS physics teacher, Mr. OInes, had one bit of blackboard magic that he used often. He was short and just the right height that his shoulders were level with the vertical center of the board.
When he drew a circle, he just rotated his whole arm around his shoulder joint and produced perfectly round circles every time.
Origuy
@jl: I remember the story differently from one of his autobiographies. He was supposed to go to a Spanish class in college, but got distracted by a pretty girl and followed her into a Portuguese class. He was good enough with the language to give a paper at a Brazilian seminar, when the official language of the seminar was English.
Don
@Haroldo: I waited until it was taught out of a different text!