About three decades ago I hit my peak of being a book junkie. Bought all kinds of books, but attained a special fondness for college level textbooks. One of my profs retired and offered his entire office collection to his students. I wasn't aware of this for about a month when he casually mentioned to me one day, hey, Mike, by the way in case you're interested I'm giving these books away or throwing them away. I said seriously? I'll take them all if you don't mind. He was a bit of a grouch and he said, I don't care if you take em all or not but if you want em then you need to take em because otherwise I'm throwing them out. I asked if he could give me a day and he said fine. I went and bought some boxes and scored a sweet collection of all the rest of the books that hadn't been taken already. Ah, but I digress, hahaha. Anyway, I also scored a $125 boxed set of the Feynman Lectures for Christmas from my Mom. Here they are now for free: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu
Yes, they are a fantastic resource and now all for free. My parents gave me that set my sophomore year in college [physics major]. I still have them of course. You may enjoy reading "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman" Perhaps my favorite story is the time he and his college buddies were arguing about the ability to pee in space. No one had been in space before and no one was sure of the effects of very low gravity. Is peeing a function of muscles or is gravity required? If astronauts can't pee, that could be a real problem! After they debated the issue for a time, Feynman decided to prove that you can pee in zero gravity. You pee by muscle control, he argued. He proved it by standing on his head and peeing. Another favorite quote of mine: Physics is to Math what Sex is to Masturbation -- Richard Feynman Feynman invented the subject Quantum Electrodynamics and wrote the definitive text for the layman. Here we find wonderful quotes such as " What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does. Feynman is also the one who figured out why the Challenger Shuttle exploded.
Yes Sir - I've read both, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character" and also James Gleick's Bio, "Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" I don't think Feynman figured out the O-ring issue on his own, but as I recall he certainly brought his classic approach to his participation on the Rogers Commission. Here's a very short video that captures his classic move with the polymer and the glass of ice water, His Appendix F to the Rogers Commission Report is also a must read. His prediction of the catastrophic failure rate of a shuttle mission was pretty close having concluded it was about a percent where the data show 2 out of 135 missions failed catastrophically. https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt
My favorite section in the Feynman lecture series is the one that discusses the physics of lightning. Fascinating stuff. I want to say it is in Book II, Chapter 7, but it has been a long time
