“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way—by rote or something. What they do is memorise.”

The full Feynman Lectures are now online. All three volumes. Free. The same lectures that shaped how a generation of physicists think about the universe.

Here’s what struck me reading through the discussion: people keep saying these aren’t for learning physics. They’re for learning how to think about physics. The memorisation critique from the quote above? That’s the entire point of the books.

The computation lectures specifically are almost spooky in how current they sound. Feynman talking about quantum mechanics and simulation in 1983, laying out the exact problem that would become quantum computing. Not speculation—clear as day, this is what you’d need to solve, here’s the math.

But the more interesting thread is the pushback. People are tired of the Feynman worship. The guy had real flaws that get glossed over. His treatment of women, the self-mythologizing, the “cool guy” persona that doesn’t hold up.

Hard to disagree with that. The lectures stand on their own. The personality cult? Less so.

That said—skip the lectures if you want to pass a physics exam. Read them if you want to understand why physics is beautiful in the first place.