[HN Gopher] The Feynman Lectures on Physics Audio Collection
___________________________________________________________________
The Feynman Lectures on Physics Audio Collection
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 392 points
Date : 2021-05-29 02:37 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu)
| erwinh wrote:
| Wait what?? There were audio recordings of these???
| amai wrote:
| Feynmans last lectures have only been published last year:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.08594
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Is there a way to download these?
| captn3m0 wrote:
| For MP4 (2.6GB) wget -qO-
| "https://hastebin.com/raw/amekevecum" | wget -nv --referer="htt
| ps://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html" --user-
| agent="Mozilla/5.0" --input-file -
|
| For OGG: wget -qO-
| "https://hastebin.com/raw/esukabunew" | wget -nv --referer="htt
| ps://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.html" --user-
| agent="Mozilla/5.0" --input-file -
|
| Titles are here:
| https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flpplaylist.js
| [deleted]
| stweise wrote:
| thanks so much
| czarymary wrote:
| wget -qO- "https://hastebin.com/raw/amekevecum" | wget -nv --
| referer="https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/flptapes.htm
| l" --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0" --input-file -
| [deleted]
| loxias wrote:
| The URL to the media file is easy to see in inspector, in
| firefox or chrome. it downloads happily with curl as long as
| you preserve the cookies.
|
| The filenames follow a (mostly) predictable pattern, amenable
| to a simple for loop. After downloaded, I extracted the audio
| with ffmpeg.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Just renaming to M4A should also work - the MP4 files only
| have a audio stream.
| vessenes wrote:
| So much dislike for these!
|
| I dug through Apple's audio book section at some length and
| purchased Feynman's overall survey of math, a sort of toss-off in
| the middle of his physics lecture series, and I _love_ it. It's
| just the most profoundly enthusiastic holistic summary of basic
| mathematics I can imagine packed into a one hour talk. I'm going
| to listen to it again today.
|
| The pleasure of these lectures is getting to spend a little time
| in Feynman's head, appreciating the world the way he does,
| unpacking it the way he does. I don't think they deserve the side
| eye - they're a really unique product of a very unique person,
| and a culturally valuable thing to have around.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Wow this is awesome. Like other has asked, is there a way to
| download these? Would love to listen to these when I'm driving or
| at work.
| lisper wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27323235
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jishiav042 wrote:
| Thy Myth. The Man. The Legend
| intellaughs wrote:
| Thank you for this! Can't wait to try to start listening to these
| during workouts.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Oh I wish I could tell my past Caltech student self to tape
| record the lectures.
|
| Feynman gave a guest lecture to our freshman Physics class about
| potato chip worlds. I wish someone recorded it.
|
| It simply never occurred to me, or apparently anyone else, even
| though those portable Radio Shack cassette recorders were around.
| akg_67 wrote:
| My last boss had Feynman as his physics professor at Caltech. I
| had read most of Feynman non-physics books and some physics
| books. When he found out my interest in Feynman, we used to
| have interesting talk about him over lunch, mostly him talking
| about Feynman lectures.
| Teever wrote:
| Potato chip worlds?
|
| Go on...
| caturopath wrote:
| The first thing that came to mind was a hyperbolic universe.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Worlds that appeared flat to the inhabitants but had weird
| geometry because they were curved in strange ways.
|
| The point was how your perspective could hide your world's
| true nature.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| Reminds me of Greg Egan's Dichronauts
| cb321 wrote:
| Ah, yes. Following in the delightful tradition of Flatland
| [1]. Rudy Rucker's Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth
| Dimension (1977) may be a fun read {perhaps less fanciful
| than Potato Chip World} for those interested.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
| martyvis wrote:
| Or the Planiverse by A.K.Dewdney
| systemvoltage wrote:
| That makes me wonder what could we be doing now that we're not?
| The time now is just like the time when you were in the lecture
| at Caltech. I kind of wish we had recorded more of Steve Jobs
| and wish he was more open for university
| lectures/presentations. This is their legacy and although we
| document their story, nothing quite beats audio/video of their
| own self - as they express grand ideas.
| paxys wrote:
| We are still throwing away massive amounts of historical data
| every day simply because it isn't in any corporation's
| financial interests to keep it. Efforts like the internet
| archive have very recently gained steam and are nowhere near
| enough.
| mhb wrote:
| Libraries (the putative repositories of this data) have
| also done more than their share in destroying it:
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-
| doubl...
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| I spied similar patterns as a student and started
| collecting books I valued. As a consequence I have some
| not very valuable but rather rare items that I cherish
| and couldn't read anywhere else, even digitally (at least
| at the time). One example, and probably highly
| controversial, is "The New Romans"--a collection of
| essays, poems, aphorisms, and other short writings by
| every major Canadian writer of the 50s-70s about America
| including bpNichol, Margaret Atwood, Farley Mowat,
| Michael Ondaatje, Irving Layton, Margaret Laurence,
| Dennis Lee (the list goes on and on) edited by Al Purdy
| (and personally signed by him and Bill Bissett each with
| a note to someone named Arlene. A monumental undertaking
| gathering from all of these writers for one edition at
| the height of their careers. You can still find copies,
| and affordable, but there was one printing in paperback
| in 1968 and never again.
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23362827-the-new-
| romans *
|
| I've invested a lot of money, and lugged them and some
| vinyl records back and forth across the country with me.
|
| Still, I'm wary to pin that on libraries as a whole or as
| an entity as if the library itself was the problem. The
| problem is "move fast and break things" and digital
| maximalism (as the article itself ends up pointing to as
| a culprit). I'd point to the pressure to install
| "disruptive" management and those kinds of trend-chasing
| moves in organizational structure (it's invaded
| publishing, too)
|
| It's funny, my day job is working with computers and I
| love programming and putting computers to good use, but
| the more I learn and the more I grow the more I prefer
| the physical world to our new digital one. (As I curse my
| phone for autocorrecting the wrong words, but still
| persist in typing this comment)
|
| ----
|
| * Bonus, here's a favourite poem from the book by John
| Robert Columbo https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/oh-
| canada
| mhh__ wrote:
| Although I don't really consider a lot of what we
| (programmers) do engineering, it does make me happy that we
| do is documented reasonably thoroughly if it's open source.
|
| There's so much brilliant work of the past only accessible in
| either archives or spoken word, whereas code can at least be
| preserved as-is.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What I love about Github is not only having archival
| storage in the cloud, but all the forks are copies on
| individuals' computers.
|
| git may turn out to be a far more valuable invention than
| Linus ever imagined.
| tomerbd wrote:
| I don't understand why everyone so much adore feynman lectures
| there are plenty of other prof. who explain much much better for
| example suskind
| publicola1990 wrote:
| Yes, I find Leon N Cooper was also very good at explaining
| physics.
|
| His 'Meaning as Structure of Modern Physics' is as good an
| resource for freshman physics as Feynman lectures.
|
| Also there are topics Feyman himself thought was covered
| hastily, if I recollect correctly, and that included
| thermodynamics.
| beagle3 wrote:
| My theory is something I call "The Feynman effect". Feynman has
| a talent of making the listener believe that they (the
| listener) understand everything at a _very_ deep level. So it
| gives the feeling he 's an amazing teacher -- and if you don't
| actually try to _apply_ that knowledge, you might never notice
| that you 're wrong.
|
| I realized that after reading his lecture on "the principle of
| least action" coming out with the feeling that I deeply
| understand (among other things) calculus of variations - a
| field I didn't even know existed until I read that. So I tried
| to use it -- and realized that, other than recreating Feynman's
| example, I can't really use it for anything.
|
| I shared the sentiment with others over lunch the next day (a
| couple of other undergrads and two graduate students), and they
| were all familiar with that feeling....
| prestonbriggs wrote:
| Happens in other fields too. When I worked at Tera, I (and
| plenty of others) would talk to Burton Smith in the halls.
| Whatever the topic, he always made us feel included and
| smart. Then, after the conversation, as we moved apart, our
| IQ would drop and our understanding would fail.
|
| Except maybe some of it stuck. Hope so.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| I wish I could frame this comment for every first-year
| student. The profound irony of the Feynman Lectures is that
| although they are revered as master works, the whole endeavor
| was a _miserable failure_.
|
| Feynman was teaching an intro sequence, and he delivered a
| lovely set of lectures that grad students and professors
| enjoyed. We still give newly minted physics majors a lovely
| bound copy of the Lectures, because some of us are in on the
| joke.
| CalChris wrote:
| I interviewed a Caltech grad for a job once. She was
| completely qualified (overqualified?) and I figured that out
| in all of about 3 minutes. So I asked her if she'd taken
| Feynman. She smiled and said she'd sat in on a seminar where
| he lectured and, similar to your Feynman effect, she said
| that he had the ability to take the most complicated idea,
| crystalize it, explain it and that you would understand it.
| This effect lasted for about 5 minutes after which you would
| confuse yourself.
|
| BTW, she didn't get the job which was not my doing. My boss
| was a woman who felt threatened by having another woman who
| was massively smarter than she was.
|
| As for Feynman, I'm more than ok with his lectures. Clarity
| is no substitute for application but it damn well helps
| application.
| paulpauper wrote:
| That is becase feynman lectures, or any physics lecture, will
| not give you a solid math framework.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think you could get a relatively solid math framework
| just by studying physics and learning the math concept when
| you encounter it in your physics education.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I think this is a very easy trap for the layperson to fall
| into with physics.
|
| Interestingly, "false understanding" by lay people seems more
| common in physics than perhaps any other field I am familiar
| with.
| armatav wrote:
| The point of lecture is not to teach you the subject
| throughly. That's what practice is for. The point of lecture
| is to get you so profoundly interested in the concepts you're
| learning that you'll go and do the practice without feeling
| like you're doing any work.
| d0mine wrote:
| It depends on a person. For me the lectures deserve all the
| praise they've got and more.
|
| I've read Feynman lectures twice. First time in the secondary
| school -- it was above my head but it gave me an
| understanding, the right models to work with later. The
| second time I read it in the university after I'd already
| studied the topics by other means (through complex math using
| e.g., Landau and Lifshitz textbooks). Now, I could
| appropriate the full depth of the lectures.
|
| It is often useful to have several perspectives on a subject
| , to know it better in particular to solve complex problems
| (the more tools you can apply, the better).
| beagle3 wrote:
| Oh, I definitely agree. I appreciate the perspective. The
| Feynman lectures are great at giving an intuition and
| perhaps a general framework for thought.
|
| What they don't give you are tools; like you say, you had
| to learn them in other places before really appreciating
| the lecture.
|
| But those lectures _do_ seem to leave many people with the
| feeling they also got the tools and not just the gist.
|
| They are enjoyable. They are informative. But they are not
| at a textbook level, even though they leave the impression
| that they are.
| Shugarl wrote:
| The reason why they are so popular is because
| school/textbook leaves the opposite impression to most
| people, i.e. we're given tools without the "gist".
|
| I'd been in a prep school for 3 years, and people were
| just regurgitating what they had been shown, applying
| formulas with a very vague idea of what they're doing or
| what their results means.
|
| School is just about remembering things and finding
| patterns.
| yesenadam wrote:
| There's a Feynman story in one of his books where he
| shows a university class a french curve (a very curvy
| plastic shape used in technical drawing) and explains to
| them it has the amazing property that no matter how you
| turn it, the lowest point is tangent to the horizon. No
| one in the class realized he was just messing with them.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| Feynman is an engineer's physicist, and we're on an engineering
| board afaict
| TheGallopedHigh wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. Every physicist is an engineer and
| vice versa
| karatinversion wrote:
| Ever heard of string theory?
| Grustaf wrote:
| Susskind is great, and he's very much inspired by Feynman.
|
| Of course there are plenty of good professors that will help
| you understand physics, but I haven't heard anyone lecture in
| such an interesting way, have you?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| In particular, Feynman himself thought his lectures were a
| failed experiment.
|
| They are really more Feynman memorabilia and nerd status
| objects than used as educational resources, similar to TAOCP
| crispyambulance wrote:
| The recording linked span nearly 3 years. Why would he
| consider them to be "a failed experiment"?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It would be good if some audio engineer could somehow remaster
| these.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Feynman lectures are the SICP of physics. Out of date, not all
| that relevant but fetishized to death.
| matthewh806 wrote:
| I think people just like to make this kind of comment to sound
| deliberately contrarian. And smarter than they really are,
| also.
|
| Can you elaborate on what is "out of date" or "not all that
| relevant" about the books?
|
| What a lot of people miss about these books is the joy and
| wonder Feynman brings to the subject. There are a dime a dozen
| more appropriate books to study for in preparation for
| university exams for example. And while they contain
| fascinating material, they tend to be quite dry & drab in their
| presentation.
|
| Feynman's infectious love of physics and exploration really
| shines in these volumes and for me that gives them value in a
| different way to most textbooks. There is more to life than
| passing university exams and if someone can make a subject like
| this both accessible & enjoyable that is quite a remarkable
| achievement in my opinion
| andi999 wrote:
| In what sense are they out of date? Like vol 2 is
| electrodynamics, the basics didn't change much. Do you think
| there is a newer textbook which does not actually teach the
| same content but newer things? Could you name that book?
| anonytrary wrote:
| Personally I would not learn physics for the first time from
| the Feynman lectures. The Feynman lectures are aimed at senior
| undergrads who already took advanced physics, in my opinion. I
| read the Feynman lectures after I took advanced physics
| courses, and I got a lot more out of it than I would have at
| first I think.
| bitexploder wrote:
| As a layperson to physics, I really appreciate his approachable
| style, both in writing and in speech. Do you have any
| suggestions that are as approachable and fun for technologists
| interested in physics?
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Physics from symmetry is good.
| op03 wrote:
| Khan Academy hands down.
|
| Mainly because they give you a map and a road map if you will
| to explore the subject. Long way to go to improve the map and
| ways to explore it based on individual personality and skill
| levels but that will happen with time.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Khan academy is great, but nothing is quite like listening
| to a certified genius.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I think that is part of it. You can catch glimmers of how
| Feynman thought process worked. How he sees the world.
| And that is really cool.
| [deleted]
| Grustaf wrote:
| You don't listen to Feynman because you want the most efficient
| way to prepare for your Physics exam, or because you want to
| hear about the latest developments.
|
| You listen to him because he was one of the greatest minds of
| the century, as well as a very entertaining and charismatic
| speaker.
|
| It's not hard to see why that combination of qualities attracts
| a lot of people.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Some of the accompanying problems are not bad preparation for
| quals. They are like the ones on the old UChicago quals
| truth_ wrote:
| Out of date? Sure.
|
| But it still adds very valuable insights, and new perspectives.
| Feynman Lectures are great. Especially Vols I and II.
|
| Just because something has a community fetishizing it, it does
| not lose its value because of that.
|
| I read most of Feynman Lectures in my undergrad, and the
| experience was profoundly rewarding.
|
| It is not about gaining up-to-date knowledge of the topic. It
| is about learning the core and crux of the subject, and how to
| think about the subject.
| nafizh wrote:
| SICP is more relevant than ever depending on where in the stack
| you are working on.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It's really not.
| bavent wrote:
| Well that solves that.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| 883 pages. What is the book for dummies, like myself? I can
| put up websites, but definitely need more education on
| Programming.
|
| Or, what are the must know chapters in Structure and
| Interpretation of Computer Programming should I study?
| nafizh wrote:
| You can also take the course programming languages from the
| University of Washington on Coursera. The 3 courses use
| standard ML, racket and ruby to teach concepts a learned
| programmer should know.
| nickloewen wrote:
| _How to Design Programs_ (the 2nd edition)--
| <https://htdp.org>--is more recent and more approachable,
| but in some ways follows in the footsteps of SICP. It's a
| great place to start before digging in to SICP or one of
| the other "classics," but it's also a good choice even if
| you just want to read one book.
| morty_s wrote:
| I'd suggest reading from the foreword and working through
| chapters 1-3. You'll know if you want to finish by then.
|
| It's a really fun read; it's an exercise in thinking
| differently. If you're looking for a new/different
| perspective on programming this is it.
|
| People either love or hate this book, but it's popular for
| a reason. It's not uncommon to struggle a bit through the
| exercises. Some people dislike it for this reason.
|
| The intro CS course I took waded based on this book and I
| never even saw this book. It wasn't until after the course
| was over that I found, read, and worked through (most) of
| it. I took my time with it--a little each day.
|
| It'll definitely grant you some "aha!" moments.
| CalChris wrote:
| Start with _The Little Schemer_ [1] as a prequel to SICP.
| If you 're going to read SICP, look at the beautiful (and
| unofficial) typeset version [2].
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-
| Friedman/dp/0...
|
| [2] http://sarabander.github.io/sicp/
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Feynman started fixing radios and antennas as a kid.
|
| During the Great Depression, people did not have enough money to
| hire a radio repairman, so they hired him instead. He started
| taking incrementally more difficult jobs, until he got very
| skilled at it.
|
| Another cool fact about Feynman is that he had some built-in
| syntax highlighting for equations in his head. A very specific
| type of a condition known as grapheme-color synesthesia.
| okareaman wrote:
| Feynman used to think about the problem before doing anything,
| so his neighbor asked him why he wasn't working on the radio
| but standing there staring off into space. After Feynman fixed
| his radio, his neighbor told everyone in amazement "He fixes
| radios by thinking!" You could take this to mean he thinks
| about the problem first, but I think the neighbor (this was in
| late 1920's, early 1930's) meant that he was was amazed because
| Feynman appeared to reach into the radio with his mind to fix
| it.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Physicists joke about the Feynman Problem Solving Method:
| 1) Write down the problem. 2) Think really hard.
| 3) Write down the solution.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It was after that that he enrolled into every physics class
| he could.
|
| I think being exposed to early electronics (before
| transistors) must have been an incredible learning experience
| for a kid.
| dvk13 wrote:
| Thank you for the share @sohkamyung.
|
| Anyone else noticed that its missing lecture #21?
| simondotau wrote:
| There's a potential subset of people who don't know who Richard
| Feynman is, but might recognise a segment of one his lectures
| from the movie theatre puzzle in The Witness (the 2016 video game
| by Jonathan Blow).
|
| https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/fml.html#5
|
| (The section clipped in The Witness begins at 38 minutes, 34
| seconds.)
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I bought The Witness (the PC version) a couple of years ago,
| even though it's not a game that I'm inclined to try to play
| (and I might not even be able to play it). I bought it partly
| because I was inordinately curious about superficial packaging
| details like whether or to what extent dynamic linking would be
| used, how assets would be bundled, and whether they would be
| obfuscated so they couldn't be viewed or played outside the
| game. But I also bought it because I knew it had some
| interesting audio and video recordings, like a recording of
| Brian Moriarty's lecture "The Secret of Psalm 46". Anyway, I
| found the audio of that Feynman clip you referenced, and it was
| indeed playable outside the game, in an ordinary audio player.
| Now I'm curious about this movie theatre puzzle and the
| significance of the Feynman clip in the context of the game.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| It's not a game for everyone, but I'd suggest giving it a
| reasonably serious try if you're curious. It's by far my
| favorite puzzle game, and I generally do not like puzzle
| games.
|
| I played through it with a local retro gaming group over a
| series of sessions. That made it a lot more relaxed and fun,
| as we could share the mental load when getting a big
| fatigued. Most of it we could figure out through simple
| intuition, persistence, observation, etc, but there is one
| puzzle at the end that we hand to resort to pen and paper,
| coming up with a formalism for it.
|
| All in all it was a really cool experience.
| otaviogood wrote:
| I thought it would be nice to listen to these with my podcast
| player on iphone. Here's my too-complicated process that worked:
|
| - in Chrome inspector, look at the network tab when you click
| play on a Feynman lecture. Right click the mp4 and do "copy as
| cURL".
|
| - Go to command line (unix style) and paste. Then append to that
| command line something like "--output flp1.mp4". That will
| download the file locally with that file name.
|
| - Put the file on Dropbox or something that will get it to your
| phone.
|
| - From dropbox on iphone, share and export the file, then choose
| your podcast app. The podcast app that worked for me is "Pocket
| Casts".
|
| - Now in Pocket Casts -> Profile -> Files, you should be able to
| play the mp4s with nice podcast-style controls and learn physics
| and be happy!
| jacobmischka wrote:
| Nice, I tried doing the same, but by writing the curl command
| myself. It failed, it seems it requires ~the cookies~ because I
| was getting 403s. Thanks for the better idea!
|
| Edit: Looks like all it needed was the Referrer header.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| There's a wget one-liner here to download everything:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27323235
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| Required 'brew install wget' first for me. ;-)
| quantum_state wrote:
| As always, it is a great pleasure to listen toFeynman talk ...
| rcshubhadeep wrote:
| This made my day! Thank you so much :)
| bassman9000 wrote:
| This would be a great project for ML-enhanced audio.
| paulz_ wrote:
| I've listened to a few things lately that could benefit from
| that. You wouldn't happen to know any good models available for
| that would you?
| cjauvin wrote:
| I really wanted to follow this class taught by Steven Pinker
| [1] recently, but the audio becomes so bad after the first
| lecture that it's almost impossible to follow. It made me
| also think that there could probably be some interesting
| post-processing applied, to improve the quality.
|
| [1] https://stevenpinker.com/classes/psychological-science-
| scien...
| S_A_P wrote:
| Or izotope RX8.
| siraben wrote:
| Are there accompanying slides or pictures of the blackboard for
| these lectures?
| vmilner wrote:
| https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html
| base3 wrote:
| Remarkable. Thank you!
| kragen wrote:
| Is it just me, or is Feynman's voice clipping a lot even in the
| first couple of minutes?
| jawknee4000 wrote:
| I think it's just the first lecture, the tape of which was
| damaged somehow -
| https://twitter.com/preskill/status/1398371618372526080.
| agogdog wrote:
| It's a shame the quality fades in and out! it's unintelligible at
| times
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(page generated 2021-05-29 23:01 UTC)