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

1. Feynman was a theoretical physicist par excellence. Newton had been both experimentalist and theorist in equal measure. Einstein was quite simply contemptuous of experiment, preferring to put his faith in pure thought. Feynman was driven to develop a deep theoretical understanding of nature, but he always remained close to the real and often grubby world of experimental results.
2. Feynman diagrams are a symbolic but powerfully heuristic way of picturing what is going on when electrons, photons, and other particles interact with each other. These days Feynman diagrams are a routine aid to calculation, but in the early 1950s they marked a startling departure from the traditional way of doing theoretical physics.
3. The Feynman style can best be described as a mixture of reverence and disrespect for received wisdom. Physics is an exact science, and the existing body of knowledge, while incomplete, can’t simply be shrugged aside. Feynman acquired a formidable grasp of the accepted principles of physics at a very young age, and he chose to work almost entirely on conventional problems. He was not the sort of genius to beaver away in isolation in a backwater of the discipline and to stumble across the profoundly new. His special talent was to approach essentially mainstream topics in an idiosyncratic way. This meant eschewing existing formalisms and developing his own highly intuitive approach. Whereas most theoretical physicists rely on careful mathematical calculation to provide a guide and a crutch to take them into unfamiliar territory, Feynman’s attitude was almost cavalier. You get the impression that he could read nature like a book and simply report on what he found, without the tedium of complex analysis.
4. Physics is continually linked to other sciences while leaving the reader in no doubt about which is the fundamental discipline.
5. Right at the beginning of Six Easy Pieces we learn how all physics is rooted in the notion of law—the existence of an ordered universe that can be understood by the application of rational reasoning. However, the laws of physics are not transparent to us in our direct observations of nature.
6. A great unifying theme among particle physicists has been the role of symmetry and conservation laws in bringing order to the subatomic zoo.
7. 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.
8. “The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” (Gibbon)
9. You might ask why we cannot teach physics by just giving the basic laws on page one and then showing how they work in all possible circumstances, as we do in Euclidean geometry, where we state the axioms and then make all sorts of deductions. (So, not satisfied to learn physics in four years, you want to learn it in four minutes?) We cannot do it in this way for two reasons. First, we do not yet know all the basic laws: there is an expanding frontier of ignorance. Second, the correct statement of the laws of physics involves some very unfamiliar ideas which require advanced mathematics for their description. Therefore, one needs a considerable amount of preparatory training even to learn what the words mean. No, it is not possible to do it that way. We can only do it piece by piece. Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. The principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following: The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.” But what is the source of knowledge? Where do the laws that are to be tested come from? Experiment, itself, helps to produce these laws, in the sense that it gives us hints. But also needed is imagination to create from these hints the great generalizations—to guess at the wonderful, simple, but very strange patterns beneath them all, and then to experiment to check again whether we have made the right guess. This imagining process is so difficult that there is a division of labor in physics: there are theoretical physicists who imagine, deduce, and guess at new laws, but do not experiment; and then there are experimental physicists who experiment, imagine, deduce, and guess.
10. Now, what should we teach first? Should we teach the correct but unfamiliar law with its strange and difficult conceptual ideas, for example the theory of relativity, four-dimensional space-time, and so on? Or should we first teach the simple “constant-mass” law, which is only approximate, but does not involve such difficult ideas? The first is more exciting, more wonderful, and more fun, but the second is easier to get at first, and is a first step to a real understanding of the first idea. This point arises again and again in teaching physics. At different times we shall have to resolve it in different ways, but at each stage it is worth learning what is now known, how accurate it is, how it fits into everything else, and how it may be changed when we learn more.
11. If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.
12. This means that when we compress a gas slowly, the temperature of the gas increases. So, under slow compression, a gas will increase in temperature, and under slow expansion it will decrease in temperature.
13. The difference between solids and liquids is, then, that in a solid the atoms are arranged in some kind of an array, called a crystalline array, and they do not have a random position at long distances; the position of the atoms on one side of the crystal is determined by that of other atoms millions of atoms away on the other side of the crystal.
14. Most simple substances, with the exception of water and type metal, expand upon melting, because the atoms are closely packed in the solid crystal and upon melting need more room to jiggle around, but an open structure collapses, as in the case of water.
15. As we decrease the temperature, the vibration decreases and decreases until, at absolute zero, there is a minimum amount of vibration that the atoms can have, but not zero. This minimum amount of motion that atoms can have is not enough to melt a substance, with one exception: helium. Helium merely decreases the atomic motions as much as it can, but even at absolute zero there is still enough motion to keep it from freezing. Helium, even at absolute zero, does not freeze, unless the pressure is made so great as to make the atoms squash together. If we increase the pressure, we can make it solidify.
16. The other processes so far described are called physical processes, but there is no sharp distinction between the two. (Nature does not care what we call it, she just keeps on doing it.)
17. Carbon attracts oxygen much more than oxygen attracts oxygen or carbon attracts carbon. Therefore in this process the oxygen may arrive with only a little energy, but the oxygen and carbon will snap together with a tremendous vengeance and commotion, and everything near them will pick up the energy. A large amount of motion energy, kinetic energy, is thus generated. This of course is burning; we are getting heat from the combination of oxygen and carbon. The heat is ordinarily in the form of the molecular motion of the hot gas, but in certain circumstances it can be so enormous that it generates light. That is how one gets flames.
18. if we look at very tiny particles (colloids) in water through an excellent microscope, we see a perpetual jiggling of the particles, which is the result of the bombardment of the atoms. This is called the Brownian motion.
19. Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics. This was not known from the beginning: it took some experimenting and theorizing to suggest this hypothesis, but now it is accepted, and it is the most useful theory for producing new ideas in the field of biology.
20. A few hundred years ago, a method was devised to find partial answers to such questions. Observation, reason, and experiment make up what we call the scientific method.
21. What do we mean by “understanding” something? We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics...If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world.
22. At first the phenomena of nature were roughly divided into classes, like heat, electricity, mechanics, magnetism, properties of substances, chemical phenomena, light or optics, x-rays, nuclear physics, gravitation, meson phenomena, etc. However, the aim is to see complete nature as different aspects of one set of phenomena. That is the problem in basic theoretical physics today—to find the laws behind experiment; to amalgamate these classes.
23. Some historic examples of amalgamation are the following. First, take heat and mechanics. When atoms are in motion, the more motion, the more heat the system contains, and so heat and all temperature effects can be represented by the laws of mechanics. Another tremendous amalgamation was the discovery of the relation between electricity, magnetism, and light, which were found to be different aspects of the same thing, which we call today the electromagnetic field. Another amalgamation is the unification of chemical phenomena, the various properties of various substances, and the behavior of atomic particles, which is in the quantum mechanics of chemistry. The question is, of course, is it going to be possible to amalgamate everything, and merely discover that this world represents different aspects of one thing? Nobody knows. All we know is that as we go along, we find that we can amalgamate pieces, and then we find some pieces that do not fit, and we keep trying to put the jigsaw puzzle together. Whether there are a finite number of pieces, and whether there is even a border to the puzzle, are of course unknown. It will never be known until we finish the picture, if ever. What we wish to do here is to see to what extent this amalgamation process has gone on, and what the situation is at present, in understanding basic phenomena in terms of the smallest set of principles. To express it in a simple manner, what are things made of and how few elements are there?
24. Because the chemical properties depend upon the electrons on the outside, and in fact only upon how many electrons there are. So the chemical properties of a substance depend only on a number, the number of electrons.
25. Magnetic influences have to do with charges in relative motion, so magnetic forces and electric forces can really be attributed to one field, as two different aspects of exactly the same thing.
26. X-rays are nothing but very high-frequency light.
27. The mechanical rules of “inertia” and “forces” are wrong—Newton’s laws are wrong—in the world of atoms. Instead, it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale. That is what makes physics difficult—and very interesting. It is hard because the way things behave on a small scale is so ”unnatural“; we have no direct experience with it. Here things behave like nothing we know of, so that it is impossible to describe this behavior in any other than analytic ways. It is difficult, and takes a lot of imagination. Quantum mechanics has many aspects. In the first place, the idea that a particle has a definite location and a definite speed is no longer allowed; that is wrong.
28. there is a rule in quantum mechanics that says that one cannot know both where something is and how fast it is moving.
29. Another most interesting change in the ideas and philosophy of science brought about by quantum mechanics is this: it is not possible to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance.
30. One of the consequences is that things which we used to consider as waves also behave like particles, and particles behave like waves; in fact everything behaves the same way. There is no distinction between a wave and a particle. So quantum mechanics unifies the idea of the field and its waves, and the particles, all into one.
31. We have been seeking a Mendeléev-type chart for the new particles. One such chart of the new particles was made independently by Gell-Mann in the USA and Nishijima in Japan. The basis of their classification is a new number, like the electric charge, which can be assigned to each particle, called its “strangeness,” S. This number is conserved, like the electric charge, in reactions which take place by nuclear forces.
32. What is this “zero mass”? The masses given here are the masses of the particles at rest. The fact that a particle has zero mass means, in a way, that it cannot be at rest. A photon is never at rest; it is always moving at 186,000 miles a second.
33. In fact, there seem to be just four kinds of interaction between particles which, in the order of decreasing strength, are the nuclear force, electrical interactions, the beta-decay interaction, and gravity.
34. Physics is the most fundamental and all-inclusive of the sciences, and has had a profound effect on all scientific development. In fact, physics is the present-day equivalent of what used to be called natural philosophy, from which most of our modern sciences arose. Students of many fields find themselves studying physics because of the basic role it plays in all phenomena.
35. Statistical mechanics, then, is the science of the phenomena of heat, or thermodynamics.
36. There was an interesting early relationship between physics and biology in which biology helped physics in the discovery of the conservation of energy, which was first demonstrated by Mayer in connection with the amount of heat taken in and given out by a living creature.
37. Thus most chemical reactions do not occur, because there is what is called an activation energy in the way. In order to add an extra atom to our chemical requires that we get it close enough that some rearrangement can occur; then it will stick. But if we cannot give it enough energy to get it close enough, it will not go to completion it will just go partway up the “hill” and back down again.
38. Physics is of great importance in biology and other sciences for still another reason, that has to do with experimental techniques. In fact, if it were not for the great development of experimental physics, these biochemistry charts would not be known today. The reason is that the most useful tool of all for analyzing this fantastically complex system is to label the atoms which are used in the reactions.
39. Proteins have a very interesting and simple structure. They are a series, or chain, of different amino acids. There are twenty different amino acids, and they all can combine with each other to form chains in which the backbone is CO-NH, etc. Proteins are nothing but chains of various ones of these twenty amino acids. Each of the amino acids probably serves some special purpose.
40. If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for.
41. There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes.
42. In order to verify the conservation of energy, we must be careful that we have not put any in or taken any out. Second, the energy has a large number of different forms, and there is a formula for each one. These are gravitational energy, kinetic energy, heat energy, elastic energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, radiant energy, nuclear energy, mass energy. If we total up the formulas for each of these contributions, it will not change except for energy going in and out.
43. We call the sum of the weights times the heights gravitational potential energy—the energy which an object has because of its relationship in space, relative to the earth.
44. The general name of energy which has to do with location relative to something else is called potential energy. In this particular case, of course, we call it gravitational potential energy.
45. Elastic energy is the formula for a spring when it is stretched. How much energy is it? If we let go, the elastic energy, as the spring passes through the equilibrium point, is converted to kinetic energy and it goes back and forth between compressing or stretching the spring and kinetic energy of motion.
46. other conservation laws there are in physics. There are two other conservation laws which are analogous to the conservation of energy. One is called the conservation of linear momentum. The other is called the conservation of angular momentum.
47. The laws which govern how much energy is available are called the laws of thermodynamics and involve a concept called entropy for irreversible thermodynamic processes.
48. What is this law of gravitation? It is that every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force which for any two bodies is proportional to the mass of each and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. This statement can be expressed mathematically by the equation
49. Galileo discovered a very remarkable fact about motion, which was essential for understanding these laws. That is the principle of inertia—if something is moving, with nothing touching it and completely undisturbed, it will go on forever, coasting at a uniform speed in a straight line. (Why does it keep on coasting? We do not know, but that is the way it is.) Newton modified this idea, saying that the only way to change the motion of a body is to use force. If the body speeds up, a force has been applied in the direction of motion. On the other hand, if its motion is changed to a new direction, a force has been applied sideways. Newton thus added the idea that a force is needed to change the speed or the direction of motion of a body.
50. Any great discovery of a new law is useful only if we can take more out than we put in.
51. Why can we use mathematics to describe nature without a mechanism behind it? No one knows. We have to keep going because we find out more that way.
52. We conclude the following: The electrons arrive in lumps, like particles, and the probability of arrival of these lumps is distributed like the distribution of intensity of a wave. It is in this sense that an electron behaves “sometimes like a particle and sometimes like a wave.”
53. “It is impossible to design an apparatus to determine which hole the electron passes through, that will not at the same time disturb the electrons enough to destroy the interference pattern.” If an apparatus is capable of determining which hole the electron goes through, it cannot be so delicate that it does not disturb the pattern in an essential way. No one has ever found (or even thought of) a way around the uncertainty principle. So we must assume that it describes a basic characteristic of nature. The complete theory of quantum mechanics which we now use to describe atoms and, in fact, all matter depends on the correctness of the uncertainty principle.
54. We would like to emphasize a very important difference between classical and quantum mechanics. We have been talking about the probability that an electron will arrive in a given circumstance. We have implied that in our experimental arrangement (or even in the best possible one) it would be impossible to predict exactly what would happen. We can only predict the odds!

What I got out of it

1. A fun introductory lesson into some key physics ideas and a great view into Feynman's thinking process