Six Easy Pieces

This volume collects six chapters from Feynman's Lectures on Physics, selected as the ones requiring the least mathematics, covering atoms in motion, basic physics, the relation of physics to other sciences, conservation of energy, the theory of gravitation, and quantum behaviour.

The pedagogical quality is what makes it worth reading beyond physics. Feynman's method is to explain what is actually known, what the reasoning is, and what remains unexplained, and to be explicit about the difference. His statement that if all scientific knowledge were destroyed and one sentence could be preserved, it should be that all things are made of atoms in perpetual motion, attracting at a distance and repelling when squeezed, is his demonstration of what a compressed statement of a field's core should look like.

The chapter on conservation of energy is the most instructive for non-physicists. Feynman explains that energy conservation is a mathematical regularity rather than a mechanism, that physics has no picture of what energy is, and that the law is the observation that a certain number does not change. He is explicit that this is what a physical law amounts to, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that scientific laws explain.

The quantum behaviour chapter presents the double slit experiment and states plainly that the result cannot be explained by any classical picture and that nobody understands it in the ordinary sense.

The book is short and requires no background beyond arithmetic. Its value outside physics is as a demonstration of intellectual honesty about the boundary between what is known and what is not.