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Mike Gottlieb
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Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics New Millennium Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

In the six years since the initial publication of Feynman’s Tips on Physics (Addison-Wesley, 2006) interest in this supplement to The Feynman Lectures on Physics has continued unabated, as evidenced by the ever-increasing number of visitors to The Feynman Lectures Website (feynmanlectures.caltech.edu), created in conjunction with this project: thousands of inquiries have come in, many of them reporting suspected errata in The Feynman Lectures, and many with questions and comments about physics exercises.

It is thus with great pleasure and pride we present this second edition of Feynman’s Tips on Physics, published by Basic Books as part of a unification of print, audio, and photo rights pertaining to The Feynman Lectures on Physics—rights which had been assigned over the years to different publishers. To celebrate this fortuitous occasion, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (New Millennium Edition) is now being printed for the first time from a LaTeX manuscript, thus enabling errata to be corrected much more quickly, and electronic editions of The Lectures to be produced soon. In addition, this new edition of Feynman’s Tips on Physics is being made available in softcover at a greatly reduced price from the hardcover original, and expanded to include three insightful interviews about The Lectures:

  • with Richard Feynman, in 1966, soon after his key part in the project was finished,
  • with Robert Leighton, in 1986, about Feynman’s gifts as a lecturer— and the challenges of translating from “Feynmanese” into English, and
  • with Rochus Vogt, in 2009, about the community of professors that cooperatively taught The Feynman Lectures course at Caltech.

To all of you who e-mailed or posted questions and comments about The Feynman Lectures on Physics and Feynman’s Tips on Physics, we wish to offer our heartfelt thanks; your contributions and support have helped greatly to improve these books, and will be appreciated by future generations of readers. To those who wrote requesting more exercises, we apologize that they could not be included in this edition. However, your encouragement has inspired the creation of a new, expansive (soon-to-be-published) book, Exercises for The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

Michael A. Gottlieb
Ralph Leighton
November, 2012