The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)

Lesser known but possibly more relevant to most HN readers are Feynman's lectures on computation - https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Gentoomen%20Library/Extra/Richard... . There's some really great explanations in there of computability, information theory, entropy, thermodynamics, and more. Very little of it is now out-dated.

  Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

Unlike the commercial audio CDs of the lectures the recordings here have the chat before and after the lecture which is fun.

My favourite lecture is the standalone "The Principle of Least Action" at

https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html

Audio: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html#Ch19-audi...

One gem if you're interested in semiconductors is the Feynman lecture "There's plenty of room at the bottom." He basically laid out the case for the modern nanotechnology age in 1959

https://web.pa.msu.edu/people/yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf

I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").

Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.

I have the print version and have been working through them slowly. Funnily enough I didn’t find it very useful when I had physics classes in school/uni since most of those classes were just memorizing equations and solving problems. But now that there is no exams pressure, it makes for such wonderful reading! I think its not just an introduction to physics but to the scientific method itself. Its first principles approach is so different than most physics textbooks.

What has changed in 60 years, I wonder? If you are teaching this material, what do you have to update and/or contextualize?

"the sham legacy of Richard Feynman" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc