Reviews for Selected Papers of Richard Feynman (with Commentary)

The average rating for Selected Papers of Richard Feynman (with Commentary) based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-10-15 00:00:00 Melissa Kit Honestly, of all my textbooks this semester, this one was the most terrible. It is not well written, and if you want to look something up really fast, it's almost impossible. For instance, to look up Pascal's Principle, you get sent to the page that supposedly has the definition, etc. Instead, you get a ton of unnecessary paragraphs full of text that just talks around the principle, and never any clear definition. Any clear definitions given in 'boxes' are so convoluted and annoying that it was always much easier to look things up online. Thankfully my physics teacher was amazing this semester and I managed to ace the class without needing to use this book very often at all. Now then, can I have my 50 Euros back?

Review # 2 was written on 2013-04-10 00:00:00 Katherine Whittaker In my opinion this book stands on a very different ground than the other ones. First of all it's shorter and does not comprise a full length course on the subject, it's merely an introduction. But besides that structural difference my opinion about it differs quite substantially from the other two. For the other books in the series my TL;DR opinion was very interesting for who already knows physics, possibly confusing for a beginner. On the other hand I think the first chapters of this book offer the best introduction to quantum mechanics I have ever read. I think the usual way to teach the subject is many orders of magnitude worse than this. He focuses on the essential measurable quantities of quantum mechanics, amplitudes, and gives them a clear and coherent interpretation and rules of calculation. After his introduction I think the mathematics of Hilbert spaces would be really intuitive and natural, way more than if you started with wavefunctions as is usual. The only drawback is really the context of these lectures. This isn't a full course so he couldn't show all the structure and went straight into applications as soon as he could. Going back to the "interesting for who already knows about this, overly complicated for someone who doesn't know anything". I think lectures of quantum mechanics should really come to this book for the first few lectures. The very first chapter explaining the double-slit experiment (of which there is a recording online) and the chapter about spin one with the Ster-Gerlach experiment are absolute genius.