Reddit Reddit reviews Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

We found 25 Reddit comments about Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
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25 Reddit comments about Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher:

u/LRE · 8 pointsr/exjw

Random selection of some of my favorites to help you expand your horizons:

The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan is a great introduction to scientific skepticism.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris is a succinct refutation of Christianity as it's generally practiced in the US employing crystal-clear logic.

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor by Anthony Everitt is the best biography of one of the most interesting men in history, in my personal opinion.

Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski is a jaw-dropping book on history, journalism, travel, contemporary events, philosophy.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is a great tome about... everything. Physics, history, biology, art... Plus he's funny as hell. (Check out his In a Sunburned Country for a side-splitting account of his trip to Australia).

The Annotated Mona Lisa by Carol Strickland is a thorough primer on art history. Get it before going to any major museum (Met, Louvre, Tate Modern, Prado, etc).

Not the Impossible Faith by Richard Carrier is a detailed refutation of the whole 'Christianity could not have survived the early years if it weren't for god's providence' argument.

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman are six of the easier chapters from his '63 Lectures on Physics delivered at CalTech. If you like it and really want to be mind-fucked with science, his QED is a great book on quantum electrodynamics direct from the master.

Lucy's Legacy by Donald Johanson will give you a really great understanding of our family history (homo, australopithecus, ardipithecus, etc). Equally good are Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade and Mapping Human History by Steve Olson, though I personally enjoyed Before the Dawn slightly more.

Memory and the Mediterranean by Fernand Braudel gives you context for all the Bible stories by detailing contemporaneous events from the Levant, Italy, Greece, Egypt, etc.

After the Prophet by Lesley Hazleton is an awesome read if you don't know much about Islam and its early history.

Happy reading!

edit: Also, check out the Reasonable Doubts podcast.

u/luxo42 · 5 pointsr/IWantToLearn

Most universities have a physics 101 class tailored to people like you. If you are already in school, you could express your interest to the teacher and ask to sit in on the class. I've done this for several classes and never had a teacher refuse my request, but if they say no, you can always just pay a little money and audit the class. The cost varies per school, but at my university it was only $30.

If you are looking for a book, I'd suggest Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces. I don't remember it containing any math at all, but is excellent for understanding some of the fundamental concepts of physics.

If you have a particular concept you'd like to understand, you can ask me! I would love to talk about physics to anyone at anytime.

u/jeampz · 3 pointsr/AskPhysics

Feynman. Anything you can find on him. "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" is a brilliant introduction. It is aimed at college level but there's a significant portion of general audience material. A book was written that is a subset of the Feynman lectures that concentrates on the non-mathematical (which apparently means "easy") parts.

Edit: Okay, perhaps not anything you can find.

u/thewretchedhole · 3 pointsr/Science_Bookclub

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

I'm a science noob and I was told this is a good layman-introductory book. Fingers crossed people haven't read this already.

u/raindogmx · 3 pointsr/mexico

Gracias!

No, el de Feynman es biográfico, basado en grabaciones que hizo un cuate de él. Es excelente. Acaba de salir una versión en novela gráfica que se llama Feynman.

Para divulgación de Feynman ahorita estoy leyendo uno que se llama Six Easy Pieces, que es un extracto para mensos de sus famosas lecturas de física.

u/airshowfan · 2 pointsr/AskEngineers

a. Stanford. But a lot of people who work with me did not go to big-name schools. UC Irvine, Iowa State, Oregon state, etc. Where I work, there's lots of UW. Where I used to work before that; lots of RPI and USC.

b. I got great grades in high school, but slipped a little bit in college. (This made my life difficult later. A good GPA makes it easier to be hired, and is practically necessary if you want a Masters, something that many many many engineers have today). Classes: I'm sure I'm not the first one to tell you this, but take all the math and physics you can. And try to learn some of this stuff outside of school (it can be more fun that way), pick up some books, try to get through the Feynman Lectures on Physics (or just Six Easy Pieces and QED to start off), some Martin Gardner, books like Euler's Gem, learn HTML, try your hand at programming, build LEGO robots... all that kind of stuff will make it easier to learn the stuff you need to learn to become an engineer.

u/[deleted] · 2 pointsr/Physics

QED, Six Easy Pieces, and Six Not So Easy Pieces are great reads for the interested layperson. Also, Einsteins original Relativity is great, and doesn't have super-complicated math.

u/sebso · 2 pointsr/Physics

15 might be a good age to introduce her to some Dick.

u/Rapturehelmet · 2 pointsr/AskPhysics

All the video sources I'm finding seem... spotty, but Richard Feynman's lectures on physics are the best in my opinion. He starts out with the basic foundations modern physics and progresses into much more difficult territory. They're well written, and definitely a good read for anyone who wants a basic understanding of physics.

I have these copies of his lectures which I like because they split up the easy and the hard topics in to separate books. But this is just personal opinion, and there are many, many copies of his works out there.

u/Gnome__Chompsky · 2 pointsr/askscience

I'd disagree. While the Lectures book itself is a harder lift, he further adapted it for lay audiences as Six Easy Pieces.

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Easy-Pieces-Essentials-Explained/dp/0465025277

u/StartDale · 2 pointsr/Physics

No not reliable at all. New age spiritual nonsense with the word quantum thrown around with no rhyme or reason!

Read any of these instead. Actual physics books for new to physics readers;

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0393609391/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_.n-xDb972EWGF

Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/178416075X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_Po-xDbCXBA3FT

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by its Most Brilliant Teacher https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0465025277/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_sq-xDbBG45M3D

u/The-Ninja · 2 pointsr/PhysicsStudents

The Physics AS/A Levels are a funny lot of modules; I believe they're designed to be doable without any A Level-equivalent Maths knowledge, so they're riddled with weird explanations that really try to avoid maths - which often just makes everything harder in the long run. (I did AQA Physics A, but all were pretty similar as far as I gathered.)

With that in mind, if you're looking to study Physics further on, I'd recommend supplementing your mathematics. If you're doing Further Maths, you probably needn't bother, as the first year of any university course will bore you to death repeating everything you learnt about calculus etc.; if you're doing single Maths, I'd recommend getting confident with C1-4, and maybe purchasing the Edexcel (Keith Pledger) FP1/FP2 books to get slightly ahead before uni. They're great books, so might be useful to have for Y1 of uni and reference thereafter regardless. I was quite put off by the attitude towards Y1 maths of the Further Maths people (about half the cohort), who kept moaning about having done it all already, so found focusing in lectures a tad harder; I wish I'd bothered to read just a little ahead.

The second thing I'd recommend would be reading fairly broadly in physics to understand what aspect in particular you enjoy the most. In my experience, the students who have even a rough idea of what they want to do in the future perform better, as they have motivation behind certain modules and know how to prioritise for a particular goal, e.g. summer placement at a company which will look for good laboratory work, or even as far as field of research.

To that end (and beginning to answer the post!), books that aren't overly pop-science, like Feynman's Six Easy Pieces/Six Not-so-Easy Pieces are good (being a selection of lectures from The Feynman Lectures). Marcus Chown does a similarly good job of not dumbing things down too much in Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and We Need to Talk About Kelvin, and he talks about a good variety of physical phenomena, which you can look up online if they interest you. I could recommend more, but it really depends how you want to expand your physics knowledge!

E - darn, just read you're not in the UK. Oops. Mostly still applies.

u/Dont-Fear-The-Raeper · 1 pointr/preppers

Did it have a noticeable taste?

I had a few cases of water that got sun affected and you could really taste the plastic. My cousin told me I was mad and gladly drank them all.

From my elementary knowledge of physics (Six Easy Pieces) it wouldn't be a great idea.

u/WillWeisser · 1 pointr/books

Personally, I think you would get great suggestions on /r/physics. But since you're here...

Since you seem like you're just dipping your toes in the water, you might want to start off with something basic like Hawking (A Brief History of Time, The Universe in a Nutshell).

I highly recommend Feynman's QED, it's short but there's really no other book like it. Anything else by Feynman is great too. I found this on Amazon and though I haven't read it, I can tell you that he was the greatest at explaining complex topics to a mass audience.

You'll probably want to read about relativity too, although my knowledge of books here is limited. Someone else can chime in, maybe. When I was a kid I read Einstein for Beginners and loved it, but that's a comic book so it might not be everyone's cup of tea.

If you really want to understand quantum mechanics and don't mind a little calculus (OK, a lot), try the textbook Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by Griffiths. Don't settle for hokey popular misconceptions of how QM works, this is the real thing and it will blow your mind.

Finally, the most recent popular physics book I read and really enjoyed was The Trouble with Physics by Smolin. It's ostensibly a book about how string theory is likely incorrect, but it also contains really great segments about the current state of particle physics and the standard model.

u/robkroese · 1 pointr/Physics

Feynman's Six Easy Pieces is a great introduction to quantum mechanics. Gary Zukov's book The Dancing Wu Li Masters doesn't have a great reputation among physicists because it strays a bit into mysticism, but I think it's a pretty good read. Capra's Tao of Physics is in the same category. For an easy-to-understand discussion of the weirdness of quantum mechanics, Fred Kuttner and Bruce Rosenblum's Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness is excellent.

This is an Amazon list of books on the subject that I found helpful:

Robert Kroese, author of Schrödinger's Gat

u/isaac1682 · 1 pointr/Physics
u/dnew · 1 pointr/philosophy

> moving very slowly through time (i.e, the jiggling atoms are slower

Those are not the same thing. You're getting it backwards. Moving slowly through space doesn't mean you're moving slowly through time. It just means it takes longer to get to where you're going in space.

If you put a clock on an airplane, and you synchronize it with your watch, and then the airplane flies around the world, when it lands, your watch will have measured more elapsed time than the clock on the plane. (People have actually done this with atomic clocks, and it really happens.)

The movement of the airplane through space "uses up" some of its movement through time, so the airplane has moved through less time than you have while you were standing still. The clock (and everything else, like how hungry the passengers are) reflects this. Note that for an airplane, the difference is a tiny fraction of a second, but it's real and has to be compensated for in GPS satellites for example.

(Note that if neither of you speeds up or slows down, each of you is moving slower than the other, which is one of the weird things about relativity and why it's called "relativity".)

When you cool an object, the atoms move more slowly through space; that is correct. Their time doesn't slow down. Chemical reactions (like milk spoiling) progress more slowly, because it's less likely that when two molecules in the substance bump into them they're less likely to be going fast and hence bump together hard enough to react. Water evaporates more slowly when it's cold because any given water molecule getting to the surface is less likely to be going fast enough to pop free of the surface and into the air. But think about it like bumping two lumps of clay together: if you get the two lumps going faster, they're more likely to stick together.

If you make something very hot (like in a particle accelerator like the LHC) by making it move very fast, the time the particle experiences slows down, so a particle that would normally undergo radioactive decay in a billionth of a second sticks around long enough to see. The "cosmic rays" you sometimes hear about are particles coming in from space that only live a fraction of a second, but they're going so fast that their time is so slow (compared to ours) that they last long enough to get all the way from space down to the ground, several seconds.

Fun stuff.

If you want some basic normal every-day "here's how physics works" explained by the guy who won a Nobel prize for explaining to theoretical quantum mechanics theory guys how to understand quantum mechanics, try this: http://www.amazon.com/Six-Easy-Pieces-Essentials-Explained/dp/0465025277 No math involved.

If you want to learn why Einstein's relativity works the way it does, and you understand the Pythagorean Theorem about how long the sides of a right triangle are, try http://www.amazon.com/Six-Not-So-Easy-Pieces-Relativity-Space-Time/dp/B0009IINXE

Basically, if you understand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxrlcLktcxU#t=32 you can understand why Relativity works the way it does. (Mind, you might not believe it... :-)

Forgive me if you already know this stuff and I'm just being confusing because I'm talking about it in a confusing way.

u/Lemonkopf · 1 pointr/Physics

Unfortunately, a good understanding of quantum mechanics requires a basic understanding of classical physics.

I would recommend "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" by Gary Zukov. https://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Wu-Li-Masters-Overview/dp/0060959681/ref=sr_1_1 "6 Easy Pieces" by Richard P. Feineman https://www.amazon.com/Six-Easy-Pieces-Essentials-Explained/dp/0465025277/ref=sr_1_1? My personal favorite is "Understanding Physics" by Isaac Asimov https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Physics-Volumes-Magnetism-Electricity/dp/B000RG7YPG/ref=sr_1_2? HTH

u/im_eddie_snowden · 1 pointr/explainlikeimfive

> Feynman

Feynman was the original ELI5 when it came to physics. I remember this book clearing up a lot of things for me.

u/outatime333 · 1 pointr/askscience

Really expensive collection of lectures
or
The third chapter of Six Easy Pieces which is the six easiest lectures from the same collection. I opted for cheap, but that complete set is looking mighty tempting.

u/jared_the_great · 1 pointr/premed

It's probably not quite as directly tied to the specifics of first-year curriculum as Klein, but Feynman's Six Easy Pieces is a great intro to the big picture in physics. If you really want to understand physics, Feynman is one of your best resources.

u/Lanza21 · 1 pointr/bestof

Fortunately, special relativity isn't that mathematically intensive. If you took college algebra and trigonometry, it will be familiar to you. If you took calculus, it will be mathematically easy. Although the concepts are certainly difficult.

This book presents it at a very simple level.

This book and this book present some very interesting physics at a layman level. I'd suggest it to anybody curious about topics such as relativity.

u/proffrobot · 1 pointr/AskPhysics

It's great that you want to study particle physics and String Theory! It's a really interesting subject. Getting a degree in physics can often make you a useful person so long as you make sure you get some transferable skills (like programming and whatnot). I'll reiterate the standard advice for going further in physics, and in particular in theoretical physics, in the hope that you will take it to heart. Only go into theoretical physics if you really enjoy it. Do it for no other reason. If you want to become a professor, there are other areas of physics which are far easier to accomplish that in. If you want to be famous, become an actor or a writer or go into science communication and become the new Bill Nye. I'm not saying the only reason to do it is if you're obsessed with it, but you've got to really enjoy it and find it fulfilling for it's own sake as the likelihood of becoming a professor in it is so slim. Then, if your academic dreams don't work out, you won't regret the time you spent, and you'll always have the drive to keep learning and doing more, whatever happens to you academically.

With that out of the way, the biggest chunk of learning you'll do as a theorist is math. A decent book (which I used in my undergraduate degree) which covers the majority of the math you need to understand basic physics, e.g. Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, Thermodynamics, Statistical Mechanics and Electromagnetism. Is this guy: Maths It's not a textbook you can read cover to cover, but it's a really good reference, and undoubtably, should you go and do a physics degree, you'll end up owning something like it. If you like maths now and want to learn more of it, then it's a good book to do it with.

The rest of the books I'll recommend to you have a minimal number of equations, but explain a lot of concepts and other interesting goodies. To really understand the subjects you need textbooks, but you need the math to understand them first and it's unlikely you're there yet. If you want textbook suggestions let me know, but if you haven't read the books below they're good anyway.

First, particle physics. This book Deep Down Things is a really great book about the history and ideas behind modern particles physics and the standard model. I can't recommend it enough.

Next, General Relativity. If you're interested in String Theory you're going to need to become an expert in General Relativity. This book: General Relativity from A to B explains the ideas behind GR without a lot of math, but it does so in a precise way. It's a really good book.

Next, Quantum Mechanics. This book: In Search of Schrodinger's Cat is a great introduction to the people and ideas of Quantum Mechanics. I like it a lot.

For general physics knowledge. Lots of people really like the
Feynman Lectures They cover everything and so have quite a bit of math in them. As a taster you can get a couple of books: Six Easy Pieces and Six Not So Easy Pieces, though the not so easy pieces are a bit more mathematically minded.

Now I'll take the opportunity to recommend my own pet favourite book. The Road to Reality. Roger Penrose wrote this to prove that anyone could understand all of theoretical physics, as such it's one of the hardest books you can read, but it is fascinating and tells you about concepts all the way up to String Theory. If you've got time to think and work on the exercises I found it well worth the time. All the math that's needed is explained in the book, which is good, but it's certainly not easy!

Lastly, for understanding more of the ideas which underlie theoretical physics, this is a good book: Philsophy of Physics: Space and Time It's not the best, but the ideas behind theoretical physics thought are important and this is an interesting and subtle book. I'd put it last on the reading list though.

Anyway, I hope that helps, keep learning about physics and asking questions! If there's anything else you want to know, feel free to ask.