100%(10)100% found this document useful (10 votes) 6K views515 pagesThe Feynman Lectures On Physics (Vol 1)
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LECTURES ON
PHYSICS
MAINLY MECHANICS, RADIATION, AND HEAT
RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physies
California Institue of Technology
ROBERT B. LEIGHTON
Professor of Physies
California Institute of Technology
MATTHEW SANDS
Professor
Stanford University
ADDISON-WESLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY
Reading, Massachusots
Menlo Park, Calfornia ~ London » Amsterdam » Don Mils, Ontario - Sydney Copyright © 1963,
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Printed in the United Stotes of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card No, 63-2017
Suxth printing, February 1977
40 CRW 9695 Feynman’s Preface
These are the lectures in physics that I gave last year and the year before to the
Jhman and sophomore classes at Caltech, The lectures are, of course, not
verbatin—they have been edited, sometimes extensively and sometimes less so.
‘The lectures form only part of the complete course. The whole group of 180
students gathered in a big lecture room twice a week to hear these lectures and.
then they broke up into small groups of 15 to 20 students in recitation sections
under the guidance of a teaching assistant. In addition, there was a laboratory
session once @ week,
The special problem we tried to get at with these lectures was to maintain the
rest of the very enthusiastic and rather smart students coming out of the high
schools and into Caltech, They have heard a lot about how interesting and excit
ing physics is—the theory of relativity, quantum mechanies, and other modern
ideas. By the end of two years of our previous course, many would be very dis
ouraged because there were really very few grand, new, modern idess presented
to them. They were made to study inclined planes, electrostatics, and so forth,
and after two years it was quite stultifying. The problem was whether or not we
‘could make a course which would save the more advanced and exsited student by
maintaining his enthusiasm,
The lectures here re not in any Way meant to be a survey course, but are very
serious. T thought to address them to the most intelligent in the class and to make
sure, if possible, that even the most intelligent student was unable to completely
encompass everything that was in the lestures—by putting in suggestions of appli-
cations of the ideas and concepts in various directions outside the main line of
atigck. For this reason, though, T tried very hard (o make all the statements as
accurate as possible, to point out in every case where the equations and ideas fitted
into the body of physics, and how—when they leaened more—things would be
‘modified, also felt that for such students it is important to indicate what it is
that they should—if they are sufficiently clever—be able to understand by deduc-
tion from what has been said before, and what is being put in as something new.
‘When new ideas came in, 1 would try either to deduce them if they were deducible,
‘or to explain that it was a new idea which hadn’t any basis in terms of things they
had already learned and which was not supposed to be provable—but was just
added in.
‘At the start of these lectures, [assumed that the students knew something when
they came out of high sehoo!—such things as geometrical optics, simple chemistry
{deas, and so on. 1 also didn’t see that there was any reason to make the lectures
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