I couldn’t wait to push this one out: the Feynman Lectures on Physics online are now complete! All 3 volumes are available from the website beautifully typeset using MathJax. I wrote about the website when it first came online and wanted to follow-up now that they are complete.
I really do hope that this books becomes a standard, free, online textbook for introductory physics courses. I know one critique that my undergraduate physics professors had was that there just weren’t enough good, thought-provoking problems to work on. We used Halliday & Resnick for our course and there were TONS of problems in each section to work on. Dr. King (my prof) really liked the book because of the conceptual problems that every chapter had, not just the plug-and-chug numerical problems. I can definitely see where he was coming from but I still think Feynman’s book is better. I have not worked through the supplementary book of problems that you can buy (not sure if they will ever be available online or not) but I hear good things so maybe that paired with these lectures would give H&R a run for their money?
As I said in my previous post, I hope that they eventually make some of the diagrams and experiments interactive so that it can truly be an online textbook that takes advantage of the online environment. Not sure if that takes away from Feynman’s idea or not but it would be really cool!