SIX NOT SO EASY PIECES

The unqualified success and popularity of Six Easy Pieces sparked a
clamor, from the general public, students, and professional scientists alike, for more Feynman in book and audio. So we went back
to the original The Feynman Lectures on Physics and to the Archives
at Caltech to see if there were more “easy” pieces. There were not.
But there were many not-so-easy lectures that, although they contain
some mathematics, are not too difcult for beginning science students; and for the student and the layperson, these six lectures are
every bit as thrilling, as absorbing, and as much fun as the first six.
Another difference between these not-so-easy pieces and the first
six is that the topics of the first six spanned several fields of physics,
from mechanics to thermodynamics to atomic physics. These new
six pieces you hold in your hand, however, are focused around a
subject which has evoked many of the most revolutionary discoveries and amazing theories of modern physics, from black holes to
worm holes, from atomic energy to time warps; we are talking, of
course, about Relativity. But even the great Einstein himself, the
father of Relativity, could not explain the wonders, workings, and
fundamental concepts of his own theory as well as could that guy
from Noo Yawk, Richard P. Feynman, as reading the chapters or
listening to the CDs will prove to you.
We wish to thank Roger Penrose for his penetrating Introduction to this collection; Brian Hatfield and David Pines for their invaluable advice in the selection of the six lectures; and the
California Institute of Technology’s Physics Department and Institute Archives, in particular Judith Goodstein, for helping to make
this book/CD project happen.