The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume One is a dense, comprehensive, and enjoyable educational material for anyone curious about physics. He goes into detail about how the physical universe works. The book is organized in a way that encourages readers to read from cover to cover. It's not a reference book, but a series of lectures on the quantifiable subject of our shared physical reality. Feynman is a phenomenal teacher. His breadth of knowledge helps digest this topic in a comprehensible manner for those willing to learn. Moreover, my takeaway is that the study of physics, mathematics, and its application, engineering, only explains how things work; the question of why things work is for humanity to decide.

Here are quotes from the book:

The astronomers, for example, have only looked at some of the stars. Every day they turn their telescopes to other stars, and the new stars are doing the same thing as the other stars. We therefore conclude that the universe is not a fluctuation and that the order is a memory of conditions when things started. This is not to say that we understand the logic of it. For some reason, the universe at one time had a very low entropy for its energy content. And since then, the entropy has increased. So that is the way towards the future. That is the origin of all irreversibility. That is what makes the process of growth and decay, that makes us remember the past and not the future. We remember the things which are closer to that moment in the history of the universe when the order was higher than now, and why we are not able to remember things where the disorder is higher than now, which we call the future.

So as we commented in an earlier chapter, the entire universe is in a glass of wine. If we look at it closely enough, in this case, the glass of wine is complex because there is water and glass and light and everything else. Another delight of our subject of physics is that every simple and idealized thing, like the ratchet and pawl, works only because they are part of the universe. The ratchet and pawl works in only one direction because it has some ultimate contact with the rest of the universe. If the ratchet and pawl were in a box and isolated for some sufficient time, the wheel would not be more likely to go one way than the other. But because we cool off at night and get heat from the sun, the ratchet and pawl that we make can churn one way. This one-wayness is interrelated with the fact that the ratchet is part of the universe. It is part of the universe not only in the sense that it obeys the physical laws of the universe, but its one-way behavior is tied to the one-way behavior of the entire universe. It cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the universe is reduced still further from speculation to scientific understanding.

We conclude this chapter by remarking on the connection with quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, the vibrating object or the thing that varies in space is the amplitude of a probability function that gives the probability of finding an electron or system of electrons in a given configuration. This amplitude function can vary in space and time and satisfies, in fact, a linear equation, but in quantum mechanics there is a transformation in that what we call frequency of the probability amplitude is equal, in the classical idea, to energy. Therefore, we can translate the principles stated above to this case by taking the word frequency and replacing it with energy. It becomes something like this: The quantum mechanical system, for example, an atom, need not have a definite energy, just as the simple mechanical system does not have to have a definite frequency. But no matter how the system behaves, its behavior can always be represented as a superposition of states of definite energy. The energy of each state is characteristic of the atom, and so the pattern of amplitude, which determines the probability of finding particles in different places, the general motion can be described by giving the amplitude of each of these different energy states. This is the origin of energy levels in quantum mechanics, since the quantum mechanics is represented by waves in the circumstance in which the electron does not have enough energy to ultimately escape from the proton. They are confined waves. Like the confined waves of a string, there are definite frequencies for the solution of the wave equation for the quantum mechanics. The mechanical interpretation is that these are definite energies. Therefore the quantum mechanical system, because it is represented by waves, can have definite states of fixed energy, examples are the energy levels of various atoms."

(I started this study because of the quantum computing FUD within Bitcoin circles, but as i continue to read on this topic I have a hunch the quantum computers ability to hack through cryptographic proofs are not in whole a discourse on the computational proofs - how complex the cryptography is, but more so the energy intensity for such hacks ie; the hash rate.)

At first, one might think that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. However, light in glass has a phase velocity less than the speed of light in a vacuum. And it is possible to shoot a charged particle at a very high energy through a block of glass such that the particle velocity is close to the speed of light in a vacuum, while the speed of light in the glass may only be two-thirds the speed of light in the vacuum. A particle moving faster than the speed of light in the medium will produce a conical wave of light with its apex at the source, like the wave wake from a boat, which is from the same effect, as a matter of fact.

(This explains why our information technology, and microprocessors are so fast! But the truth is man does not live in a vacuum again proving my my thoughts that computers are apathetic to humanity, not humanity itself.)

So our problem is to explain where symmetry comes from. Why is nature so nearly symmetrical? No one has any idea why. The only thing we might suggest is something like this: There is a gate in Japan, the gate of Nikkō, which is sometimes called by the Japanese the most beautiful gate in all Japan. It was built at a time when there was great influence from Chinese architecture. This gate is very elaborate with lots of gavels and beautiful carvings and lots of columns and dragon heads and princes carved into the pillar and so on. But when one looks closely, he sees that in the elaborate and complex design along one of the pillars, one of the small design elements is carved upside down. Otherwise, the thing is completely symmetrical. If one asks why this is, the story is that it was carved upside down so that the gods will not be jealous of the perfection of man. So they purposely put an error in there so that the gods would not be jealous and get angry with human beings. We might like to turn the idea around and think that the true explanation of the near symmetry of nature is this: that God made the laws only nearly symmetrical so that we should not be jealous of His perfection."