Do you remember the movie “Innerspace”? A scientific experiment leads Lt. Tuck Pendleton in a miniaturized spaceship mistakenly introduced into the body of a nerdy guy, Jack Putter.
This film by Steven Spielberg find probably its origin in the famous Richard Feynman’s speech “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, in 1959.
Richard Feynman, however, had little to do with movies: in addition to being considered by many as one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, he analyzed a number of interesting applications that the atomic scale manipulation of matter could generate, as microcircuits computer or supermicroscopes.
For these studies, Dr. Feynman is deemed as the father of modern nanotechnology.
Winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, liked to call himself “Nobelist Physicist, teacher, storyteller, bongo player”, showing an out of the ordinary sense of humor, which made him very popular among his students.
Too bad we were not present in one of his classes, right?
The Feynman Lectures Website and Caltech has decided to make them available (and free!) via the web site http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ and, thanks to HTML, you can zoom between diagrams, inside and outside the text, even from your smartphone.
For physics students this is certainly a great resource, but it’s even if you just want to learn about the world around you: Volume 1, in fact, will help you understand the way in which objects move, with simpler concepts such as radiation and heat. Volume 2 deals with electromagnetism and light, while Volume 3, introduces quantum mechanics.
What are you waiting for?
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