I want to order the Feynman Lectures, but I've heard some complaints about different editions (unnecessary edits, quality of print, etc...)
All of the edits made in The Definitive Edition and The New Millennium Edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics were made to correct errors. All corrections were carefully reviewed and approved by Caltech, under the supervision of Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus. If you have any questions about the necessity for these corrections. I suggest that you review them yourself; You can find them posted on the FLP Errata page at
www.feynmanlectures.info. If, after reviewing the corrections, you feel any of them should not have been made, you can write to me about it, and if you can convince me and Caltech that you are right, we will change it back!
Note that for The New Millennium Edition we created an entirely new (electronic) manuscript, and besides correcting a lot of errors, we also improved the typography and many of the figures, expanded (and unified) the indexes, and added a symbol table. Unfortunately, we also introduced some new typos - a little under one per lecture, on average - those typos are being corrected in the second printing, which will be an inexpensive paperback edition, available as a set or in individual volumes -- that printing will happen sometime in July, I think. (Of course we will also correct typos in the hardback... but that will not be reprinted until late this year.)
Which edition(s) is the best?
The New Millennium Edition is the most accurate and the most complete. The first printing, as noted above, was not perfect, but we are correcting the typos in the 2nd printing (which is the best we can do).
Also, should I get the audio tapes?
The tapes are interesting to listen to, and fun, but some of them - especially the more advanced ones - are hard to follow without being able to see what Feynman was doing (showing slides, performing demonstrations, and particularly, writing on his blackboards - not being able to see the blackboards makes following the more mathematical parts very difficult... though sometimes this can be overcome by following along in the books). Also, you will find that, if you compare the recordings of the lectures to the corresponding lectures in the books, they are markedly different. What you get in the books is a kind of "refined Feynman" - clarified, sometimes corrected, and occasionally supplemented, by Feynman's two co-authors Sands and Leighton. (A straight transcription of Feynman would be almost unreadable. Leighton used to half-jokingly call his job, "Translating Feynmanese into English." Only ONE lecture in all of FLP is "almost verbatim" and that is chapter 19 of Volume II, on The Principle of Least Action, a subject dear to Feynman's heart.)
And are Feynman's Tips good too?
Well, of course,
I think TIPS is good.
But I admit it
could be better, and we are working on that. The main shortcoming of the first edition, in my opinion, is that it only includes about 80 exercises, covering (rather sparsely) the material in the first 20 chapters of FLP Vol I. This is okay if you are just reading the book casually, but if you are planning to study physics from FLP (which lacks exercises), it's not enough; Exercises are needed for the rest of the material in FLP, and we are adding those now, about 900 of them, with answers. These were the exercises given to Caltech students, in Feynman's class and/or subsequent Caltech classes where FLP was used as the textbook; The Volume I exercises were made up by many people (a substantial number coming from Robert Leighton), however about 1/2 of the E&M (Vol II) exercises and about 3/4 of the QM (Vol III) exercises were invented by Feynman himself. (Don't ask me when the new edition of TIPS is going to be published - I don't know yet. We are still in the early stages of putting it together. So... probably not until next year.)
Mike Gottlieb
Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Coauthor, Feynman's Tips on Physics
www.feynmanlectures.info
