Feynman Lectures Online

When I took my first course on physics (against my will) with Prof Leonel Torres I discovered the existence of a famous physicist called Richard Feynman. At that time I was not interested on physics at all. But some things changed later. Indeed I moved to things even less serious than physics :D . Some years later I read one of my favorite books so far: Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman! in which Feynman tells his story to an interviewer and this became later his autobiography.

Feynman is famous among other things because he worked in the Manhattan project. Also he won the Nobel Prize. I recently found that Microsoft Research released a series of lectures at Cornell by Feynman in 1964. They can be found here on Youtube. So far I have watched only the first one. It is about the law of gravitation. The second one is about the relationship between physics and mathematics.

It is so amazing how a science can begin by describing "laws". That is, until there is no experiment that contradicts the law, then it still remains as a law. This is so weak and however it is the most serious method we have as humanity to understand our world. This reminds me Hilbert's problem 6: Can physics be axiomatized? I have never heard of any work on that problem.

The advantage of physics over economics is that the former has lots of predictive power. The latter does not. The predictive power of physics rely on averages. Measurements on physics are not about every single particle in a system, but just on the average that summarize the behavior of all of the particles conforming the system. Macroeconomics has tried to do that without much success.

If you feel more interested on physics than on economics (as most of you are) check these lectures by Walter Lewin from MIT. That's the best class of physics I've known of. He has on videolectures a complete course on classical mechanics and another on electromagnetism. Both of them are wonderful, I've seen almost all the lectures. By the way, once I met a guy that took one of his courses, he said it was pretty difficult but a very good professor.