← Back

Physics

My Favourite Technical Lectures

The Feynman Lectures on Physics The one on thermodynamics blew my mind when I first read it in freshman year of college.
Frederic Schuller's Lectures on Quantum Theory Wonderfully explains the rigorous math of quantum theory (think Hilbert spaces, functional analysis and measure theory). I was fascinated by the first lecture, when he says that quantum states are not elements of a Hilbert space but maps from a Hilbert space to itself (positive trace-class linear maps to be specific).

Cumrun Vafa on Lex Fridman Podcast Explains the thought experiment of why objects of different masses fall with the same acceleration under gravity. Imagine 2 bricks of the same mass a foot apart and drop them both — they fall at the same rate. Bring them closer so they are half a foot apart; same outcome. In the limit as you bring them to zero separation, the result stays the same, but you now have an object of twice the mass.