If you go up on Hulu and watch Brian Greene's NOVA three-parter on String Theory, it's atrocious - it's like hearing a Catholic priest explain the nature of Holy Spirit. He's thought through everything he's explaining from the basic foundations and takes little for granted, and he's explicit about the things he does take for granted and he understands the limits of his arguments.įeynman was famous for saying that, if you couldn't explain something to a freshman lecture, it wasn't understood and you probably didn't understand it yourself. Something that really comes through with Feynman's lectures is that he has a really solid metaphysical, experiential grounding for what he's explaining, like Einstein did. There's no question that theoretical physics has certainly declined in terms of its practical output since World War II, but that's understandable - the death of 100K Japanese and the nihilistic horror of a thermonuclear war is a hard act to follow up :) On the other hand, there's definitely some force to the argument that theoretical physics has kinda lost its way because the Philosophy of Science hasn't managed to keep pace. And the fact that America's most prominent theoretical physicist is a string theorist. Notwithstanding the numerous theoretical physicists that devote their time to it. It's great to see the rest added.ĭon't mistake the String Theory religion and everything connected to it for science. Last year we told you when Volume I was made available.
The online edition is "high quality up-to-date copy of Feynman's legendary lectures," and, thanks to the implementation of scalable vector graphics, "has been designed for ease of reading on devices of any size or shape text, figures and equations can all be zoomed without degradation." Volume I deals mainly with mechanics, radiation and heat Volume II with electromagnetism and matter and Volume III with quantum mechanics. The three-volume set may be the most popular collection of physics books ever written, and now the complete online edition has been made available in HTML 5 through a collaboration between Caltech (where Feyman first delivered these talks, in the early 1960s) and The Feynman Lectures Website.
#Can you watch the feynman lectures online series
Anna Merikin writes In 1964, Richard Feynman delivered a series of seven hour-long lectures at Cornell University which were recorded by the BBC, and in 2009 (with a little help from Bill Gates), were released to the public.