The Character Of Physical Law

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A series of classic lectures, delivered in 1960 and recorded for the BBC. This is Feynman's unique take on the problems and puzzles that lie at the heart of physical theory - with Newton's Law of Gravitation; on whether time can ever go backwards; on maths as the supreme language of nature. This collection demonstrates Feynman's knack of finding the right everyday illustration to bring out the essence of a complicated principle - for example, the brilliant analogy between the law of conservation energy and the problem of drying yourself with wet towels.

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A genius who brought us new ways to view the world' Independent Richard P. Feynman, co-creator of the atomic bomb, Nobel Prize winner and solver of the Challenger space shuttle disaster was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinkers. He was at various times a repairer of radios, a picker of locks, an artist, a dancer, a percussionist, and a decipherer of Mayan hieroglyphics. Consistently rejecting authority, wholeheartedly embracing the value of doubt, Feynman’s infectious sense of curiosity infused everything he did. When Richard Phillips Feynman was born in Far Rockaway, New York, in 1918, his father was desperate to encourage him to think ‘like a scientist’. His father’s methods worked. Feynman went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then Princeton, where he received his Ph.D. in 1942. Feynman was a key player in the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory where he helped to build the atomic bomb during the Second World War and shortly afterwards he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cornell University, where he worked with Hans Bethe. Quantum physics explains how a thing is both a wave and a particle, or can have no mass at rest yet has measurable momentum while moving and it was in this field that Feynman made massive breakthroughs. QED contains lectures outlining his theories that revolutionised our understanding of quantum electrodynamics - which is how light and electrons interact - and he shared the Nobel Prize for this work in 1965. Feynman’s simplified rules of calculation became standard tools of theoretical analysis in these areas and ‘Feynman diagrams’ presented a new way of seeing the world.