The Lectures of Physicist richard Feynman

[Nessus]

Bill Gates recently digitized the old Cornell University lectures of Richard Feynman from 1959. Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project and was a pioneer in particle physics. This is a series of lectures given to freshman on the basics of physics, it's good stuff. I started watching just a part of the lecture on gravity and the motion of planets and wound up watching the entire thing.

You have to install Microsoft silverlight to watch it but it doesn't run as a process so it seems to do no harm.

Here's the lectures if anyone's interested,

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=4|0||||

[peoplessi]

Very cool. I would love to have some of my lectures in video form, similar to the stuff you posted. With added stuff that you can reference whilst you watch. It's easier to recap things this way.

[Yatta]

I thought the lectures are from 1964? Very cool stuff, thanks for sharing!

[Nessus]

I'm sure you're right Yatta and they are from '64. I got confused because I just read this article by Feynman on nanotechnology and it's from 1959.

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~feynman/plenty.html

"Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?

Let's see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopaedia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch---that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopaedia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter---32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica."

[Hyperactive Slob]

Sounds interesting but it doesn't work. :(

[peoplessi]

You have Silverlight installed?

Too bad there aren't any extras on the other videos, except for the first one.