The Feynman Lectures on Physics The Feynman Lectures on Physics Feynman• Leighton • Sands Caltech and The Feynman Lectures Website are pleased to present this online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Now, anyone with internet access and a web browser can enjoy reading a high quality up-to-date copy of Feynman's legendary lectures. However, we want to be clear that this edition is only free to read online, and this posting does not transfer any right to download all or 1 of 6 The Feynman Lectures on Physics any portion of The Feynman Lectures on Physics for any purpose. This edition has been designed for ease of reading on devices of any size or shape; text, figures and equations can all be zoomed 1 without degradation. Volume I MAINLY MECHANICS, RADIATION, AND HEAT Volume II MAINLY ELECTROMAGNETISM AND MATTER Volume III QUANTUM MECHANICS For comments or questions about this edition please contact Michael Gottlieb.   2 of 6 The Feynman Lectures on Physics 3 of 6 The Feynman Lectures on Physics Richard Feynman talking with a teaching assistant after the lecture on The Dependence of Amplitudes on Time, Robert Leighton and Matthew Sands in background, April 29, 1963. Photograph by Tom Harvey. Copyright © California Institute of Technology.   Contributions from many parties have enabled and benefitted the creation of the HTML edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. We wish to thank Carver Mead, for his warm 4 of 6 The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Preface to the New Millennium Edition Buy contact us   more info ► A Preface to the New Millennium Edition Nearly fifty years have passed since Richard Feynman taught the introductory physics course at Caltech that gave rise to these three volumes, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. In those fifty years our understanding of the physical world has changed greatly, but The Feynman Lectures on Physics has endured. Feynman’s lectures are as powerful today as when first published, thanks to Feynman’s unique physics insights and pedagogy. They have been studied worldwide by novices and mature physicists alike; they have been translated into at least a dozen languages with more than 1.5 millions copies printed in the English language alone. Perhaps no other set of physics books has had such wide impact, for so long. This New Millennium Edition ushers in a new era for The Feynman Lectures on Physics (FLP): the twenty-first century era of electronic publishing. FLP has been converted to eFLP, with the text and equations expressed in the LaTeX electronic 1 of 10 The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Preface to the New Millennium Edition typesetting language, and all figures redone using modern drawing software. The consequences for the print version of this edition are not startling; it looks almost the same as the original red books that physics students have known and loved for decades. The main differences are an expanded and improved index, the correction of 885 Kip Thorne errata found by readers over the five years since the first printing of the previous edition, and the ease of correcting errata that future readers may find. To this I shall return below. The eBook Version of this edition, and the Enhanced Electronic Version are electronic innovations. By contrast with most eBook versions of 20th century technical books, whose equations, figures and sometimes even text become pixellated when one tries to enlarge them, the LaTeX manuscript of the New Millennium Edition makes it possible to create eBooks of the 2 of 10 The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Preface to the New Millennium Edition highest quality, in which all features on the page (except photographs) can be enlarged without bound and retain their precise shapes and sharpness. And the Enhanced Electronic Version, with its audio and blackboard photos from Feynman’s original lectures, and its links to other resources, is an innovation that would have given Feynman great pleasure. Memories of Feynman’s Lectures These three volumes are a self-contained pedagogical treatise. They are also a historical record of Feynman’s 1961–64 undergraduate physics lectures, a course required of all Caltech freshmen and sophomores regardless of their majors. Readers may wonder, as I have, how Feynman’s lectures impacted the students who attended them. Feynman, in his Preface to these volumes, offered a somewhat negative view.  “I don’t think I did very well by the students,” he wrote. Matthew Sands, in his memoir in Feynman’s Tips on Physics expressed a far more positive view. Out of curiosity, in spring 2005 I emailed or talked to a quasi-random set of 17 students (out of about 150) from Feynman’s 1961–63 class—some who had great difficulty with the class, and some who mastered it with ease; majors in biology, chemistry, engineering, geology, mathematics and astronomy, as well as in physics. The intervening years might have glazed their memories with a euphoric tint, but about 80 percent recall Feynman’s lectures as highlights of their college years. “It was like going to church.” The lectures were “a transformational experience,” “the experience of a lifetime, probably the most important thing I got from Caltech.” “I was a biology major but Feynman’s lectures stand out as a high point in my undergraduate experience … though I must admit I couldn’t do the homework at the time and 3 of 10 The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Preface to the New Millennium Edition I hardly turned any of it in.” “I was among the least promising of students in this course, and I never missed a lecture. … I remember and can still feel Feynman’s joy of discovery. … His lectures had an … emotional impact that was probably lost in the printed Lectures.” By contrast, several of the students have negative memories due largely to two issues: (i) “You couldn’t learn to work the homework problems by attending the lectures. Feynman was too slick—he knew tricks and what approximations could be made, and had intuition based on experience and genius that a beginning student does not possess.” Feynman and colleagues, aware of this flaw in the course, addressed it in part with materials that have been incorporated into Feynman’s Tips on Physics: three problem-solving lectures by Feynman, and a set of exercises and answers assembled by Robert B. Leighton and Rochus Vogt. (ii) “The insecurity of not knowing what was likely to be discussed in the next lecture, the lack of a text book or reference with any connection to the lecture material, and consequent inability for us to read ahead, were very frustrating. …  I found the lectures exciting and understandable in the hall, but they were Sanskrit outside [when I tried to reconstruct the details].” This problem, of course, was solved by these three volumes, the printed version of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. They became the textbook from which Caltech students studied for many years thereafter, and they live on today as one of Feynman’s greatest legacies. A History of Errata The Feynman Lectures on Physics was produced very quickly by Feynman and his co-authors, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew Sands, working from and expanding on tape recordings and blackboard photos of Feynman’s course 4 of 10 The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Preface to the New Millennium Edition 1 lectures (both of which are incorporated into the Enhanced Electronic Version of this New Millennium Edition). Given the high speed at which Feynman, Leighton and Sands worked, it was inevitable that many errors crept into the first edition. Feynman accumulated long lists of claimed errata over the subsequent years—errata found by students and faculty at Caltech and by readers around the world. In the 1960s and early ’70s, Feynman made time in his intense life to check most but not all of the claimed errata for Volumes I and II, and insert corrections into subsequent printings. But Feynman’s sense of duty never rose high enough above the excitement of discovering new things to make him deal with the errata in 2 Volume III. After his untimely death in 1988, lists of errata for all three volumes were deposited in the Caltech Archives, and there they lay forgotten. In 2002 Ralph Leighton (son of the late Robert Leighton and compatriot of Feynman) informed me of the old errata and a new long list compiled by Ralph’s friend Michael Gottlieb. Leighton proposed that Caltech produce a new edition of The Feynman Lectures with all errata corrected, and publish it alongside a new volume of auxiliary material, Feynman’s Tips on Physics, which he and Gottlieb were preparing. Feynman was my hero and a close personal friend. When I saw the lists of errata and the content of the proposed new volume, I quickly agreed to oversee this project on behalf of Caltech (Feynman’s long-time academic home, to which he, Leighton and Sands had entrusted all rights and responsibilities for The Feynman Lectures). After a year and a half of meticulous work by Gottlieb, and careful scrutiny by Dr. Michael Hartl (an outstanding Caltech postdoc who vetted all errata plus the new volume), the 2005 Definitive Edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics was born, with about 200 errata corrected and 5 of 10 The Feynman Lectures on Physics: Preface to the New Millennium Edition accompanied by Feynman’s Tips on Physics by Feynman, Gottlieb and Leighton. I thought that edition was going to be “Definitive”. What I did not anticipate was the enthusiastic response of readers around the world to an appeal from Gottlieb to identify further errata, and submit them via a website that Gottlieb created and continues to maintain, The Feynman Lectures Website, www.feynmanlectures.info.  In the five years since then, 965 new errata have been submitted and survived the meticulous scrutiny of Gottlieb, Hartl, and Nate Bode (an outstanding Caltech physics graduate student, who succeeded Hartl as Caltech’s vetter of errata). Of these, 965 vetted errata, 80 were corrected in the fourth printing of the Definitive Edition (August 2006) and the remaining 885 are corrected in the first printing of this New Millennium Edition (332 in volume I, 263 in volume II, and 200 in volume III). For details of the errata, see www.feynmanlectures.info. Clearly, making The Feynman Lectures on Physics error-free has become a world-wide community enterprise. On behalf of Caltech I thank the 50 readers who have contributed since 2005 and the many more who may contribute over the coming years. The names of all contributors are posted at www.feynmanlectures.info/flp_errata.html. Almost all the errata have been of three types: (i) typographical errors in prose; (ii) typographical and mathematical errors in equations, tables and figures—sign errors, incorrect numbers (e.g., a 5 that should be a 4), and missing subscripts, summation signs, parentheses and terms in equations; (iii) incorrect cross references to chapters, tables and figures. These kinds of errors, though not terribly serious to a mature physicist, can be frustrating and confusing to Feynman’s primary audience: 6 of 10