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The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman. In these Messenger Lectures, originally delivered at Cornell University and recorded for television by the BBC, Feynman offers an overview of selected physical laws and gathers their common features into one broad principle of invariance. He maintains at the outset that the importance of a physical law is not "how clever we are to have found it out, but . . . how clever nature is to pay attention to it," and tends his discussions toward a final exposition of the elegance and simplicity of all scientific laws. Rather than an essay on the most significant achievements in modern science, The Character of Physical Law is a statement of what is most remarkable in nature. Feynman's enlightened approach, his wit, and his enthusiasm make this a memorable exposition of the scientist's craft. The Law of Gravitation is the author's principal example. Relating the details of its discovery and stressing its mathematical character, he uses it to demonstrate the essential interaction of mathematics and physics. He views mathematics as the key to any system of scientific laws, suggesting that if it were possible to fill out the structure of scientific theory completely, the result would be an integrated set of mathematical axioms. The principles of conservation, symmetry, and time-irreversibility are then considered in relation to developments in classical and modern physics, and in his final lecture Feynman develops his own analysis of the process and future of scientific discovery.
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Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: The Reason for Antiparticles by Richard Feynman & Towards the Final Laws of Physics by Stephen Weinberg. This book contains transcriptions of the two lectures given in Cambridge, England, in 1986 by Nobel Laureates Richard P. Feynman and Steven Weinberg to commemorate the famous British physicist Paul Dirac. The talks, given for non-specialists and undergraduates in physics, focus on the fundamental problems of physics and the present state of our knowledge. Professor Feynman discusses how the laws of physics require the existence of antiparticles; Professor Weinberg examines the development of the fundamental laws of elementary particle interaction.
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QED the Strange Theory of Light and Matter. This volume, constituting the printed version of the first of the Alex G. Mautner Memorial Lectures to be given periodically at UCLA, certainly gets this new series off to a flying start. World-renowned for the liveliness and creativity of his physical insights, Caltech physicist Feynman provides another of his tours de force as he clearly explains the arcane workings of quantum electrodynamics, a theory which Feynman himself helped to establish. Starting with such familiar phenomena as the reflection and refraction of light, Feynman goes on to describe in detail the interactions between electrons and light. Although the text requires more concentration to grasp than most science popularizations, things never get out of hand.
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