“It’s worth a lot of miles to talk with you about anything and everything.”

John Wheeler referring to Richard P. Feynman, November 28, 1978 (Caltech Archives) in “The Quantum Labyrinth” by Paul Halpern


“His ideas are strange; I don’t believe them at all. But it is surprising how often we realize later that he was right.”

Richard P. Feynman referring to John A. Wheeler, in “Inside the Mind of John Wheeler”, 1986, in “The Quantum Labyrinth” by Paul Halpern


“To be normal or unconventional, that is the question. Is it better to be regular, predictable, and straightforward or bizarre, haphazard, and mercurial?”

in “The Quantum Labyrinth” by Paul Halpern



Do people in Quantum electrodynamics end their proofs with Q.E.D?

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

Because the pagination works as Lecture No. - Page No. instead of just Page No. it's hard to say how far one is through this book. Hence the number above reflects the LECTURE NUMBER out of 42. I'm doing a re-read of this volume which is mainly classical electrodynamics.

There is much that is meritorious here: Feynman's distinctive voice comes through clearly. One gets an insight into both his teaching philosophy and his working methods. The book heavily reflects what Feynman thought was important, interesting and essential to know about the field and makes accessible some really unusual topics as well as some familiar ones (if one has ever done an entry level course on the subject). There is a 10p memoir of Feynman by the book's editor at the end, which contains some delightful anecdotes that are not recorded elsewhere in the Feynman canon.

Feynman's working method, which he encourages others to adopt, was to work out as much as he can on his own first and look up what others had done afterwards. He would find that usually he had come up with no original results but quite often would have reached the same conclusions by an alternative route. Occasionally he proved something that was not known before. This technique is fabulous if one has both a wide knowledge (in memory) of physics and maths and a great facility with both, too. For lesser mortals it's completely useless.

The book oscillated from fascinating (reversible computing, quantum computers) to excruciatingly dull (logic circuit design, chip fabrication, semi-conductor device theory) depending on my personal level of interest. Even Feynman can't make engineering interesting to me! But that's not his fault; if you're into these topics it'll be great. If you're not, it's for Feynman completists only.

Kinda just want this last chapter to be over, now; the current topic bores me and is in many respects very out of date.

We arrived at the physics of MOSFET transistors and the like; this is a topic I found dull as an undergrad, despite liking other solid-state physics topics, such as phonon transport, band theory and even crystallography. This, it appears, is down to the fact that how semi-conductor devices work is really engineering, not physics.