Richard Feynman - The.Character of Physical Law - Part 1 The Law of Gravitation (full version) on HackerTube: recommended by 6 Hacker News commenters across 6 separate months, 2013–2022.
lecture · evergreen
The first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Cornell Messenger Lectures, The Character of Physical Law, focusing on the law of gravitation. Feynman builds up from planetary motion to the nature of physical laws.
HN people recommend it as a masterclass in explaining physics clearly without condescension, accessible without formal training.
“Feynman is so good at explaining these concepts that you don't even need any formal training to understand them.”
9 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
The Feynman Lectures (on Physics) are incredible - Feynman had such an amazing mind, one of the greatest the world has known, yet could explain complex things like he was talking to a friend in the living room over drinks. Never patronizing, always amusing & informative: ▶ this video
in “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?” · View on HN
Edit: apparently, I have been misinformed for a very long time. These are still excellent lectures to watch though! The Feynman Lectures are now on Youtube[0], and I like to watch them (all of them) every few years. I highly recommend that if you've never seen them, you take some time and watch them- really watch them. Close the other windows, turn your phone to do not disturb, and really watch these masterpieces of education. [0] ▶ this video
in “If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it” · View on HN
Physics is just mindblowing. When I think deeply about the fact that things that are moving will keep on moving forever unless a force acts on them, and the fact that no one knows why it's true (and that the question may not even have any meaning), and that my body is nothing more than a very advanced method of propagating genetics, then... well, it's just a lot of fun to think about! The fact that there are mysteries that no life will ever have answers to is quite humbling. If you find physics interesting, then you'll love these Feynman lectures. Feynman is so good at explaining these concepts that you don't even need any formal training to understand them. Lecture 1: The Law of Gravitation ▶ this video Lecture 2: The Relation of Mathematics to Physics [link] Lecture 3: The Great Conservation Principles [link] Lecture 4: Symmetry in Physical Law [link] Lecture 5: The Distinction of Past and Future [link] Lecture 6: Probability and Uncertainty [link]
in “Neutrino shape-shift points to new physics” · View on HN
Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Laws ▶ this video Incredible talk for both the content and the form ! There is so much we could learn from him.
in “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?” · View on HN
If you haven't seen it yet, Feynman's podcast series The Character of Physical Law is quite wonderful: ▶ this video
in “Feynman's Lost Lecture (ft. 3Blue1Brown) [video]” · View on HN
It's kind of a classic, but I really enjoyed Richard Feynman lectures[0], especially on subjects I thought I knew well. [0] - ▶ this video
in “Ask HN: What talks or videos do you suggest to watch on a long flight?” · View on HN
It saddens me what will be lost if youtube continues on this route, 99% of the content is garbage, and the 1% good content is hardly monetizable, and there is 0.001% that content creators monetize with some form of sponsorship, but not so much from google's pov You can see Dirac himself speak ( [link] ), Feynman ( ▶ this video ), Jung( [link] ), Minsky, McCarthy, Ellul, Ram Dass, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Terence McKenna and Alan Watts and many many more people who greatly influenced our understanding and way of life Youtube is quickly turning worse, just as google, with the flood of click baity content, and not only them, look at cnn.com or foxnews.com you will see every single article is with click bait title. I dont think the issue is in the dislike button, I think they have to up their game to help you navigate the sea of garbage to find some islands of good content. The reddit rule of 90/9/1% is no longer true (90% of community members are lurkers who read or observe, but don't contribute. 9% of community members edit or respond to content but don't create content of their own) now it seems we are more to 20/30/50% (my intuition), and the tooling and understanding used to decide what content to create and game the system has improved a lot. Like in video games, the way people play videogames now is fundamentally different than 5 years ago, now you are expected to minmax your character, items, gameplay etc because there are so many tools and guides out there to help you, but the sam
in “No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me” · View on HN
I always thought that this was interesting... I am sure that many of you are familiar with Dr. Feynman's 7-part lecture series entitled The Character of Physical Law , which were part of the "Messenger Lectures" [1], given at Cornell University in 1964. In the first lecture, Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law , Feynman states the following: "Question: what is the ratio of the gravitational force to the electrical force? That is illustrated on the next slide. The ratio of the gravitational attraction to the electrical repulsion is given by a number with 42 digits, and goes off here: all this is written very carefully out, so that's 42 digits. Now, therein lies a very deep mystery: where could such a tremendous number come from? That means if you ever had a theory from which both of these things are to come, how could they come in such disproportion? From what equation has a solution which has for one, two kinds of forces, an attraction and a repulsion with that fantastic ratio? People have looked for such a large ratio in other places. They're looking for a large number. They hope, for example, that there's another large number. And if you want a large number why not take the diameter of the universe to the diameter of a proton. Amazingly enough, it also is a number with 42 digits." [2] [1] [link] [2] ▶ this video
in “42” · View on HN
"Beauty", in science and mathematics, is not a quality of the object regarded so much as it is a pattern-recognition response in the one regarding it. Patterns which are predictable are naturally pleasing to us because our pattern-recognition abilities evolved to harness the patterns of nature for prediction of outcomes. Predicting and harnessing outcomes based on patterns may be the power that humans posses in strength over the other animals. It should not be the case that exploration of an outcome is excluded on the basis that it is not perceived as beautiful. However, that there are patterns among the laws of nature was one of the fundamental discoveries of our species and a guiding principle of modern science. Richard Feynman said[1]: "Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." [1]: ▶ this video
in “Is Scientific Truth Always Beautiful?” · View on HN