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The Character of Physical Law

Richard P. Feynman

Hardcover | Pages: 192 pages

Rating: 4.29 | 5727 Users | 196 Reviews

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Title	:	The Character of Physical Law
Author	:	Richard P. Feynman
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 192 pages
Published	:	November 8th 1994 by Modern Library (first published 1964)
Categories	:	Science. Physics. Nonfiction. Philosophy. Popular Science

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In the Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Cornell University & recorded for TV by the BBC, Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws & gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance. He maintains at the outset that the importance of a physical law isn't "how clever we are to have found it out, but...how clever nature is to pay attention to it" & tends his discussions toward a final exposition of the elegance & simplicity of all scientific laws. Rather than an essay on the most significant achievements in modern science, The Character of Physical Law is a statement of what is most remarkable in nature. His enlightened approach, wit & enthusiasm make this a memorable exposition of the scientist's craft. The Law of Gravitation is the principal example. Relating the details of its discovery & stressing its mathematical character, he uses it to demonstrate the essential interaction of mathematics & physics. He views mathematics as the key to any system of scientific laws, suggesting that if it were possible to fill out the structure of scientific theory completely, the result would be an integrated set of axioms. The principles of conservation, symmetry & time-irreversibility are then considered in relation to developments in classical & modern physics. In his final lecture he develops his own analysis of the process & future of scientific discovery. Like any set of oral reflections, The Character of Physical Law has value as a demonstration of a mind in action. The reader is particularly lucky in Feynman. One of the most eminent & imaginative modern physicists, he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology until his death in 1988. He's best known for work on the quantum theory of the electromagnetic field, as well as for later research in the field of low-temperature physics. In 1954 he received the Albert Einstein Award for an "outstanding contribution to knowledge in mathematical & physical sciences"; in 1965 he was appointed to Foreign Membership in the Royal Society & was awarded the Nobel Prize.

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Original Title:	The Character of Physical Law
ISBN:	0679601279 (ISBN13: 9780679601272)
Edition Language:	English URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_feynman

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Ratings: 4.29 From 5727 Users | 196 Reviews

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This is a fantastic little book for which we have to thank the BBC: They decided to film these lectures and subsequently publish transcripts of them, at a time before Feynman had turned into a one-man industry and every one of Feynman`s students`first-draft lecture notes became as diamond dust.The title tells one enough about the contents; if you have any interest in the topic you should read this book. It is almost but not completely non-mathematical. If you can cope with the algebra contained

Feynman is a great man to tell you about nature and physics and philosophy behind it. But he does this in a way that makes it hard for you to listen and enjoy most of such-called scientists talking about science, he makes you feel the difference.

It is impossible, by the way, by picking one of anything to pick one that is not atypical in some sense. That is the wonder of the world. I would probably be giving this little book five stars if I wasn't already familiar with much of it from reading Feynman's Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces. There's a good deal of overlap in the material, and Feynman even uses several of the same examples and analogies. It seems he was so often explaining these things that he developed a method. I



I read this transcript of lectures and watched some of them on YouTube as well. The first few are good reviews about gravity and basic physics concepts, but the interesting bits are about the nature of the laws themselves: how they were discovered and how science works in practice. I was surprised to learn first that the axiomatic approach that grounds mathematics isn't the most effective way to approach physics and that (relatedly) physicists often guess at the right explanations and only later

This is not a book about the content of physics, but the practice of physics. What is it physicists do and how do they think? Feynman's explanation here is unmatched in its clarity and accessibility.

I once had a friend that I was tutoring in physics explain to me that this was her intro physics "textbook". Amazingly, though I was studying physics, I hadn't really been introduced to Richard Feynman in any real way. That Saturday, I sat down with a cup of coffee in my small rooming house kitchen and started reading this book. Feynman is a magician of explanation. On every page I read, Feynman took some concept that I was familiar with and tugged it apart, then with a sly turn deftly snapped