Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, Richard Feynman

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces:  lectures on Symmetry, Relativity, and Space-Time by Richard P. Feynman is a follow-on to Six Easy Pieces which I read years ago before I started this blog.  Richard Feynman is simply brilliant and his lucid explanations of difficult things makes physics far more approachable.

Started:  1/16/2018
Completed: 1/24/2018
Recommendation: Mild Recommendation
Recommended By:  Nobody

Review:

I really like Feynman and I really like Six Easy Pieces.  This book is a good excerpt from the original Feynman lectures and similar to his other work, this was clear, concise, and easy reading.  I only have a mild recommendation because the only new thing I got from this was a better understanding of why a Lorentz Transformation has the particular equations it does.  This is no small thing, but I wonder about how a Lorentz Transformation would work with 4 spatial dimensions (https://phys.org/news/2018-01-four-dimensional-physics-dimensions.html).  Since this lecture series from the 1960s, it would simply not be possible to account for physics that are showing up in 2018, so it is not a shortcoming of Feynman, just the shocking speed with which our understanding of physics is changing.

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