Feynman lecture on Physics

I have always liked Feynman as a physicist - I felt like his lectures might be too good not to be read during grad school. Today I am reading the E&M part - since I am a E&M TA this quarter. I am starting from the very first chapter where he describes the basics - you can usually tell if the book 's good if the author can go through the basic math in a crystal clear way.

I cannot believe how he verbalized Gauss' law and the concept of and divergence It is just mind blowing - every undergrad should have learned it this way - i.e. to understand what's going on before looking at the math symbols! He put: (Electric) flux = (average normal component ) * (surface area)

(Magnetic) circulation = (avg. tangential component) * (distance of the loop)

so that Gauss' law can simply be verbalized as flux of E field through any closed surface = enclosed charge / epsilon_naught

Those are just some really very simple and easy to understand words that hides all the complicated math from first time learners. Sometimes I really hope that I have the clarity to promote physics concepts like these to my students.

As a TA and a physics student myself, I experience all too often that once a student starts fearing a subject, i.e. once s/he sees the complicated math, s/he stops thinking about what's going on and just tries to pull whatever seems relevant for solving a problem. They would not make the equations / math / the physical model adapt to the problem but just substitute whatever seems convenient. Setting up the problem correctly allows you to get through 90% of the problem, the rest is usually just algebra / computation. Students often do not see that.....

Anyway, it's good that the Feynman lectures are at an undergrad level so it's still quite light of a reading. Hopefully I will get through all three volumns then start reading some graduate level books such as Landau and Liftshitz.