Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Six Easy Pieces grew out of the need to bring to as wide an audience as possible a substantial yet nontechnical physics primer based on the science of Richard Feynman. We have chosen the six easiest chapters from Feynman’s celebrated and landmark text, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (originally published in 1963), which remains his most famous publication. General readers are fortunate that Feynman chose to present certain key topics in largely qualitative terms without formal mathematics, and these are brought together for Six Easy Pieces.

We would like to thank Paul Davies for his insightful introduction to this newly formed collection. Following his introduction we have chosen to reproduce two prefaces from The Feynman Lectures on Physics, one by Feynman himself and one by two of his colleagues, because they provide context for the pieces that follow and insight into both Richard Feynman and his science.

Finally, we would like to thank the California Institute of Technology’s Physics Department and Institute Archives, in particular Dr. Judith Goodstein, and Dr. Brian Hatfield, for his outstanding advice and recommendations throughout the development of this project.