Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12926 in Books
• Published on: 1992-10-29
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
This book presents a series of classic lectures, delivered in 1960 and recorded for the BBC. This is Feynman's unique take on the problems and puzzles that lie at the heart of physical theory - with Newton's Law of Gravitation; on whether time can ever go backwards; on maths as the supreme language of nature. Demonstrates Feynman's knack of finding the right everyday illustration to bring out the essence of a complicated principle - eg brilliant analogy between the law of conservation energy and the problem of drying yourself with wet towels. 'Feynman's style inspired a generation of scientists. This volume remains the best record I know of his exhilarating vision' - Paul Davies.

Customer Reviews

Not his best work, but interesting nonetheless
This is basically transcripts of a series of lectures given by Feynman. As such they are informal in style, but also relaxed on things such as sentence structure an punctuation. I'm not just being picky because this led to me having trouble reading some of the passages, they're not impenetrable, just not to his usual high standard.

The content however is good. I have read a few of his books and I wouldn't rate this amongst his best work. Usually he puts a new slant on ideas, presenting them in a way which gives fresh insights, but that isn't so evident here. He did introduce a couple of new concepts to me, like the equivalence of the symmetries and conservation laws, and how orbits can be described by conservation. These were entirely new though, so it wasn't like the new understanding of general relativity I gained from 'Six Not-so-Easy Pieces'. The final chapter on 'Seeking New Laws' fails to strike the right note for me, falling short of it's aims to explain where innovation comes from.

This is a book which doesn't deal directly with the laws of physics, there's plenty of those around already, some from the same author. It deals instead with the general structure of these laws, and how it is possible to have these laws in the first place. As such it is an interesting read, and should be considered if you have tired of books on relativity and quantum mechanics.

A very interesting book
This is a book that I really enjoyed because of Richard Feynman's fine writing style. He combined his scientific knowledge with his wit and it came out perfectly. I have read several of Mr. Feynman's books, but I think that this one comes out top. It explains gravity perfectly and the Chapter on Probability and Uncertainty was most interesting. I couldn't ask for more in a book!

Great physics audio edutainment ..
July 8, 1999 I would like to take a minute to thank Audio Scholar for abridging this novel to audio. I much prefered having a professional speaker narrate the book as previous Richard Feyman products I have purchased have really lacked in sound quality (they were not Audio Scholar products). I thoroughly enjoyed the abridged audio novel as did my 18 month old son who gets to listen to them to as his bedtime stories. I would like to encourage Audio Scholar to produce more of these types of edutainment audio programs on tape or CD. In many instances I wouldn't mind seeing the programs extend to 4 tapes or CD's. I love listening to scientific books on my way to work and also love to share them with my 18 month old son as his bedtime stories. Actually I initially started buying them for my son and then got hooked on them myself. Why should my 18 month old son get all the good stuff to listen too! My budget for this type of audio edutainment has sky rocketed from $100 a year to $1,000 a year due to the high level of quality of the Audio Scholar work. The more science and physics books abridged the better. I would love to see the following subjects abrigded to audio for distribution through Amazon.com. Maths, sciences, physics, astrophysics, geology, any and all space related topics, gravity, unified field theory, electromagnetics, electronics, microproccessor design, optics, micro-optics, electro-optics, light and the theory there of, satellites, satellite orbital mechanics and related theory, engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering. I would also like to encourage Audio Scholar to pursue the rights to abridge Michio Kaku's books to audio as well. I do not have time in my busy daily schedule to read very much, but do I have five hours a day to listen and learn. If you make it I will support it. Arnold D Veness