Essential Core Physics & Life Principles: Feynman's Six Easy Pieces
Introduction
Feynman is a witty, clear, and concise author, worth reading on your own. These are simply my personal consolidated notes of his work. In of of his own personal notes, he states this: "First figure out why you want the students to learn the subject and what you want them to know, and the method will result more or less by common sense" (xx). In the preface, he states that "the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher--a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about things, and talks about the things. It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing probelms that are assigned" (xxix). He explains that physics, like anything, must be learned in pieces. "Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth... everything we know is only some kind of approximation. ... The principle of science, the definition, almost, is... The test of all knowledge is experiment ... [and] imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations--to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patters beneath [hints,] and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess" (2).
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Atomic Hypothesis (matter is made of atoms): "all things are made of atoms--little partilces that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another" (4). They are \(2 \times 10^{-8} \) or 2 angstrom's \(\mathring{A}\) in radius.
Water, magnified a billion times is 'temming' [(full or swarming of things)] each with an oxygen paired with two hydrogen atoms, "continually jiggling and bouncing, turning and twisting around one another" (5) in three dimensions. ...the jiggling motion is... heat: when we increase the temperature, we increase the motion. If we heat the water, the jiggling increases and the volume between the atoms increases, and if the heating continues there comes a time when the pull between the molecules is not enough to hold them together and they do fall apart and become separated from one another... how we manufacture steam out of water--by increasing the temperature; the particles fly apart because of the increased motion" (6). "force is proportional to area" ...if the density is low enough that there are not many atoms, the pressure is proportional to the density [so] when we compress a gas slowly, the temperature of the gas increases. So, under slow compression, a gas will increases in temperature, and under slow expansion it will decrease in temperature" (8).
Watts declares that "all... kno
Finishing key takeaway from the book