[费曼物理学讲义].Feynman Lectures on Physics Complete Volumes 1-1.pdf

Feynman's Preface
These are the lectures in physics that I gave last year and the year before to the
freshman and sophomore classes at Caltech. The lectures are, of course, not
verbatim—they have been edited, sometimes extensively and sometimes less so.
The lectures form only part of plete course. The whole group of 180
students gathered in a big lecture room twice a week to hear these lectures and
then they broke up into small groups of 15 to 20 students in recitation sections
under the guidance of a teaching assistant. In addition, there was a laboratory
session once a week.
The special problem we tried to get at with these lectures was to maintain the
interest of the very enthusiastic and rather smart ing out of the high
schools and into Caltech. They have heard a lot about how interesting and excit-
ing physics is—the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and other modern
ideas. By the end of two years of our previous course, many would be very dis-
couraged because there were really very few grand, new, modern ideas presented
to them. They were made to study inclined planes, electrostatics, and so forth,
and after two years it was quite stultifying. The problem was whether or not we
could make a course which would save the more advanced and excited student by
maintaining his enthusiasm.
The lectures here are not in any way meant to be a survey course, but are very
serious. I thought to address them to the most intelligent in the class and to make
sure, if possible, that even the most intelligent student was unable pletely
pass everything that was in the lectures—by putting in suggestions of appli-
cations of the ideas and concepts in various directions outside the main line of
attack. For this reason, though, I tried very hard to make all the statements as
accurate as possible, to point out in every case where the equations and ideas fitted
into the body of physics, and how—when they learned more—things would be
modifi