Feynman and Disclosure

  • Richard Feynman - Six Easy Pieces
  • Richard Feynman - Six Pieces Less Easy
  • Richard Feynman - QED: the strange theory of light and matter
  • Richard Feynman - The Physical Law

Most readers even if they are curious to learn more about physics will never read from beginning to end an entire university course in three large volumes like Feynman’s Physics. But this is not to recommend reading some successful popular textbook, topping the sales charts, in which physics is reduced at best to a collection of fairy tales, science fiction, simple words that confuse ideas, and various hypotheses that cannot be tested experimentally. When it does not lapse into philosophical fluff, quackery, or historical gossip. Much better to read all four, or at least a couple, of these nimble little volumes by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman:

  • Six easy pieces
  • Six less easy pieces
  • QED: the strange theory of light and matter
  • The physical law

The first two collect twelve lectures selected from Feynman’s most important Physics lectures given between 1961 and 1963 at CalTech in Pasadena, as their title says six fairly easy and six more difficult.

The six “easy” ones are:

  1. Atoms in motion
  2. Basic physics
  3. The relationship between physics and other sciences
  4. The conservation of energy
  5. The theory of gravitation
  6. Quantum behavior

The six “least easy” ones are:

  1. Carriers
  2. Symmetry in physical laws
  3. Relativistic energy and momentum
  4. Space-time
  5. The curved space

“The Physical Law” collects a series of seven lectures given in 1964 at Cornell University for students of other subjects (NOT physics students) and the general lay public (so no mathematical formulas):

  1. The law of gravitation
  2. The relationship between physics and mathematics
  3. The principles of conservation
  4. Symmetry in physical law
  5. The distinction between past and future
  6. Probability and indeterminacy
  7. In search of new laws

Finally, “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter” is a small masterpiece of popularization in which Feynman expounds to students and the man in the street on the research that won him the Nobel Prize, and on quantum field theory in general. It is based on a series of lectures and lectures given around 1980 at UCLA in Los Angeles. it is divided into four parts:

  1. Introduction
  2. Photons: particles of light
  3. Electrons and their interactions
  4. Undefined conclusions

“Many scientific “vulgarizations” achieve apparent simplicity only at the cost of describing something other than what they claim to be describing, and indeed significantly distorted. Respect for the subject matter has not allowed us to do the same. Through many hours of discussion we strove to achieve the utmost simplicity and transparency, while renouncing any compromise that would lead to a distortion of the truth.”- Richard P. Feynman (in the preface to the volume).