I've read the first book of the Feynman lectures during the last six months, only for fun, to compare the insights of Feynman with the education I've received during my school time, twenty years ago.
In that lecture Khan was ALMOST right, but I think it's not good. He mentions in one moment "the energy given to the system was the higher potential energy of the rocks" which is wrong. There's no the same amount of rocks, so the energy of the remaining (less) rocks is the same as the energy of more rocks before in the process he described.
Feynman's approach to actually understand that the energy transferred was to "speed up" the movement of the gas molecules is right, this is not.
He also "derives" the formula with delta U = Q - ... where he should have just written Q = ... because that was what was intentionally done.
So I'm not satisfied, I believe Khan was able to deliver much better lecture had he first prepared himself a little more. Maybe using some simpler book as the start but using Feynman for the insight to be able to explain what's really going on.
http://www.khanacademy.org/video/carnot-cycle-and-carnot-eng...
I've read the first book of the Feynman lectures during the last six months, only for fun, to compare the insights of Feynman with the education I've received during my school time, twenty years ago.
In that lecture Khan was ALMOST right, but I think it's not good. He mentions in one moment "the energy given to the system was the higher potential energy of the rocks" which is wrong. There's no the same amount of rocks, so the energy of the remaining (less) rocks is the same as the energy of more rocks before in the process he described.
Feynman's approach to actually understand that the energy transferred was to "speed up" the movement of the gas molecules is right, this is not.
He also "derives" the formula with delta U = Q - ... where he should have just written Q = ... because that was what was intentionally done.
So I'm not satisfied, I believe Khan was able to deliver much better lecture had he first prepared himself a little more. Maybe using some simpler book as the start but using Feynman for the insight to be able to explain what's really going on.