Entertaining and Educational

If you haven't heard them, I highly recommend six lectures by Richard Feynman called Six Easy Pieces. It's a series of introductory physics lectures he gave at Caltech to incoming freshmen. The problem was whether to teach physics in the classical sense (you know, Newton) and in later classes introduce the concepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics that change the picture of how physics works or to introduce the currently accepted picture of physics from the get-go.

So they asked Professor Feynman if he would give a series of lectures and thankfully these were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes that languished in a basement until somebody discovered them and digitally cleaned them up and made them available to the general public. The 6 1-hour lectures are available on CD or antiquated cassette tapes (which I bought for $10 on eBay).^*

He really has a way of explaining things with ordinary language and analogies. He said that if an orange were the size of the Earth, each of its atoms would be the size of an orange. I heard he once got irritated when someone used the phrase "acoustic reflection" and asked why not use the word "echo"?

There are a few dull spots, such as when he sets out to prove there can be no perpetual motion machine. I take it on faith that if there is friction, there is bound to be less than 100% efficiency in any machine.

But the high notes he hits will stimulate your imagination and leave you with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the wondrous subtle interconnections and interactions all the way from the gravity evident across unimaginable distances in a spiral galaxy down to subatomic forces.

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^* Also available from Audible last time I checked. They offer extended free samples, though I don't know what part they offer as a sample.  ¶ 10:35 PM