Richard Feynman, Robert B. Leighton and Matthew L. Sands.
(1964 Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, ISBN 0-201-51004-9.)

I have Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Western Australia. The Feynman lectures were recommended at one point in first year, but I never followed through on the suggestion. It was only later when I was tutoring that I 'discovered' the Feynman lectures. I only regret I did not discover them earlier.

The Feynamn lectures are enthusiastic, lucid and exciting. They are also not really very good first year text books- more, I believe, because first year Physics courses do not reflect the structure of the books than any failing in the Lectures. Physicists should own a copy and read them every now and then to remind themselves why they became interested in Physics in the first place, and to continue their study of 'basic' physics.

I think this excerpt gives you some idea of the tone of the book. I also believe it is characteristic of way Feynamn continually manages to surprise with a novel perspective.

Electromagnetism

1-1 Electrical Forces

Consider a force like gravitation which varies predominantly inversely as the square of the distance, but which is about a billion-billion-billion-billion times stronger. And with another difference. There are two kinds of "matter," which we call positive and negative. like kinds repel and unlike kinds attract- unlike gravity where there is only attraction. What would happen?

A bunch of positives would repel with an enormous force and spread out in all directions. A bunch of negatives would do the same. but an evenly mixed bunch of positives and negatives would do something completely different. The opposite pieces would be pulled together by the enormous attractions. The net result would be that the terrific forces would balance themselves out almost perfectly, by forming tight, fine mixtures of the positive and negative, and between two separate bunches of such mixtures there would be practically no attraction or repulsion at all.

There is such a force: the electrical force. And all matter is a mixture of positive protons and negative electrons which are attracting and repelling with this great force. So perfect is the balance however, that when you stand near someone else you don't feel any force at all. If there were even a little bit of unbalance you would know it. If you were standing at arm's length from someone and each of you had one percent more electrons than protons, the repelling force would be incredible. How great? Enough to lift the Empire State building? No! To lift Mount Everest? No! The repulsion would be enough to lift a "weight" equal to that of the entire earth!


With such enormous forces so perfectly balanced in this intimate mixture, it is not hard to understand that matter, trying to keeps its positive and negative charges in the finest balance, can have great stiffness and strength, The Empire State building, for example, swings only eight feet in the wind because the electrical forces hold every electron and proton more or less in its proper place. On the other hand, if we look at matter on a scale small enough that we see only a few atoms, any small piece will not, usually, have an equal number of positive and negative charges, and so there will be strong residual electrical forces. Even when there are equal equal numbers of both charges in two neighbouring pieces, there may still be large net electrical forces because the individual charges vary inversely as the square of the distance. A net force can arise if a negative charge of one piece is closer to the positive than to the negative charges of the other piece. The attractive forces can then be larger than the repulsive ones and there can be a net attraction between two small pieces with no excess charges. The force that holds the atom together, and the chemical forces that hold molecules together, are really electrical forces acting in regions where the balance of charge is not perfect or where the distances are very small.