Six Easy Pieces

Richard Feynman loved to play the bongos. He also loved solving problems. He figured out the reason for the space shuttle Challenger s 1986 explosion by showing that cold weather caused the rubber seals of the booster rocket to fail. Feynman was one of the twentieth century s great theoretical physicists, a Nobel Prize winner who spent much of his career studying atoms. He knew as much about atoms as anyone in the world, and this is what he said about them in his book Six Easy Pieces ... 

This picture—the modern picture of the atom—is hard to accept. Electrons are both wave and particle their position in an atom is governed by probabilities. If you ever do figure out exactly where one is, you cannot know its momentum. This is what the perceptive Professor Feynman said about the strangeness of reality at the atomic level in his book Six Easy Pieces ... 

Feynman, Richard P. Six Easy Pieces Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher. Cambridge, Mass. Helix Books, 1963. 

Feynman, R. P. (1994). Six easy pieces. Reading, MA Helix Books. 

Feynman RP, Six Easy Pieces, Penguin Books, London, 1995. 

Feynman, R.P. 1963. Six Easy Pieces. Reading, MA Addison-Wesley. 

Non-linear molecules have more rotation constants than hnear ones, and more information is in principle available for each isotopic species, though some of it may uot be easy to obtain. The discrepancies between Bq and Be types of information are important, and we may have to make an inordinate nmnber of measurements in order to calculate a few rehable structural parameters. Cousider, for example, CCXTl2, [13] for which three rotation constants (A, B and C) have been determined experimentally for the ground vibrational state and for the first excited states of aU six vibrations, a total of 21 experimental determinations. From these, the equilibrium rotation constants A., B and Ce can be found. But after aU this effort, these data contain only two independent pieces of information, as 7c = /a + /b for planar body this is indeed found to be so for the equihbrium moments of inertia, though not for those derived from the rotation constants of any of the vibrational states (ground or excited). We thus have iusufficieut data to define the structure, as this requires three parameters (the C=0 and C Tl distances, and an angle). 

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