{"id":2445,"date":"2009-07-16T13:12:13","date_gmt":"2009-07-16T20:12:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/07\/16\/feynmans-character-of-physical-law-lectures\/"},"modified":"2015-07-14T09:42:31","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T16:42:31","slug":"feynmans-character-of-physical-law-lectures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/16\/feynmans-character-of-physical-law-lectures\/","title":{"rendered":"Feynman&#8217;s Character of Physical Law Lectures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone and their niece is emailing me that I should post these.  (And <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/15\/what-questions-can-science-answer\/#comment-83073\">Aatish<\/a> in comments.)  And a good thing, too, because it usually takes at least half a dozen emails before I will do anything at all.<\/p>\n<p>In 1964, Richard Feynman gave the Messenger Lectures at Cornell, aimed at a general audience.  They were later collected into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Character-Physical-Messenger-Lectures-1964\/dp\/0262560038\/\"><em>The Character of Physical Law<\/em><\/a>, a great little book with a depressingly boring cover.  Feynman-worship is often overdone, but man, the guy could lecture.  And he knew a lot about physics!<\/p>\n<p>The good news is that Bill Gates has now put the full video of the lectures online, as part of <a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/apps\/tools\/tuva\/\">Project Tuva<\/a>.  I had to update some software to view them on my Mac, but it seems to be working now.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/apps\/tools\/tuva\/\"><img src='http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/files\/2009\/07\/feynman-lecturing.jpg' align='center' alt='Feynman Lecturing' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Lecture Five is about the arrow of time.  If you skip ahead to the 18th minute or so, you&#8217;ll hear Feynman explain the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2008\/12\/29\/richard-feynman-on-boltzmann-brains\/\">Boltzmann Brain<\/a> argument.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone and their niece is emailing me that I should post these. (And Aatish in comments.) And a good thing, too, because it usually takes at least half a dozen emails before I will do anything at all. In 1964, Richard Feynman gave the Messenger Lectures at Cornell, aimed at a general audience. They were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12532,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2445\/revisions\/12532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}