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The Feynman Messenger Lectures on Physics are available online

By Noah | January 31, 2010

Several of the legendary 1963 Feynman Lectures on Physics are now available for viewing online at at Microsoft Research’s Project Tuva (direct link to videos).  (UDPATE:  oops, my mistake! It’s not the 1963 Caltech lectures, it’s the Messenger Lectures from Cornell — see first comment below).

Feynman was one of the great physicists of the 20th century, and these lectures, which cover a range of basic topics, are famous for their clarity, insight and wit.  Very highly recommended not just for physics students, but for anyone with an interest in science and/or good teaching.  (I’m not thrilled about the proprietary Silverlight encoding, but the lectures are wonderful.  By the way, right now I’m having trouble getting lecture #1 to stream — the others look good.)

A companion book to the Cornell lectures,  The Character of Physical Law (the Messenger Lectures, 1964), is still available.  Also, for those with $120 to spend, a boxed set of the famous book version of the Caltech 1963 Feyman lectures remains in print.  For a much lighter introduction to Dick Feyman and his hijinks, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman is still good fun.

Topics: Books, Science | 1 Comment »

One Response to “The Feynman Messenger Lectures on Physics are available online”

  1. Noah Says:
    February 5th, 2010 at 12:04 PM

    Actually, Matt Springer’s Built on Facts Blog explains something that was puzzling me: These Aren’t the Real Feynman Lectures!

    What I remember seeing as a student, shown on 16mm films, were movies of Feynman giving his lectures at his class at Caltech. So, those had much more of a weekly physics lecture feel. The onese that are up at Project Tuva were lectures given to a more general audience for the Messenger lectures at Cornell. According to Matt, these more closely match Feynman’s book The character of Physical Law than they do the multipart book set I reference above.

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