I love how St. Richard the Uncertain speaks volumes to my soul as he muses about the physical laws. When he talks about the unity of the minute and the macro, he reminds me how all is united in the Unity of God.

Makes me wish I had gone to school to study physics

I especially appreciated the parts where he admitted that we don’t understand aspects of why physical laws are the way they are. It seems like too few physicists—or, at least, those who write popular and semi-popular books on the subject—will admit this in the way Feynman does.

This book contains his famous quote, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” I’d seen that quote repeated before, but didn’t have a good sense of why he said that. So here’s a bit more from Feynman on this issue:

“… the difficulty really is psychological and exists in the perpetual torment that results from your saying to yourself, ‘But how can it be like that?’ which is a reflection of uncontrolled but utterly vain desire to see it in terms of something familiar.”

At least a couple of chapters are recycled from the Feynman lectures. (In particular, Chapter 1 on gravitation and Chapter 6 on quantum mechanics, which are both in “Six East Pieces,” which are taken directly from the Feynman lectures.

I’m looking forward to reading Anil Ananthaswamy’s “Through Two Doors at Once,” for an update on the two-slit experiment (which Feynman’s chapter on QM focuses on).

Incidentally, the Feynman lectures are now available for free online, both as text and as audio recordings: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/

Great layman's explanation of fundamental physical laws and how they relate.

How delightful is Nature for Feynman and his peers. This glimpse on the Physicist method (more than the actual explanations of some laws) is a great takeaway. I already feel the approach, both in technic and in philosophy, can be applied to any kind of intellectual work.

This book is a transcript, hence it is sometimes hard to process. The videos can be seen online, that’s a great experience overall. Also it makes reading with Feynman accent in mind mandatory from now on :)

While I've enjoyed Feynman's other lectures, this series & transcript felt a bit like following the mad hatter around on a tour of wonderland after falling down the rabbit hole. I think there was an unresolved conflict between the material he was wanting to cover and the audience he imagined he was preparing it for. The result was a mash of core ideas with loose analogies and comparisons, which were more miss than hit. In typical Feynman style, he relates to the audience with wit, but here I feel like it wasn't always backed with substance.

Feynman has a way of explaining phenomenon and logic that is illuminating. No matter how much I believe I know a principle, or a way of thinking about something, when reading Feynman's words I realize that I did not actually know the thing I thought I knew.

Feynman has a well-deserved reputation for explaining complicated concepts from physics in an easy to understand way. I found a lot of interesting things in this book, some I was not really aware of before, and others that were explained in a new and better way.

There were some things I had trouble grasping. But I can't blame the book for that, as I was listening to the audio version, and didn't have access to the diagrams he references. (Also my limited math and science background may been the real culprit).

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.