| This is a collection of lectures (I suppose in 1968) by those authorities who actually created the physic as we know it today. Very much accessible and provides a rare chance to look into the minds of the giants. To introduce some of them: Hans Bethe. A teacher, collaborator, and good friend of R.P. Feynman. Participated in the Manhattan Project and helped create the bomb. The man who first realized what fuels the sun. Got his Nobel Prize for this realization (1967, thermonuclear processes). P.A.M. Dirac. Created relativistic quantum mechanics and so-called the "symbolic formulation" of quantum mechanics (the bra-ket notation). His theory formed a basis for later developments of quantum electrodynamics (QED). More of a mathematician. Had a very deep faith in mathematics. Seldom talked in public. Werner Heisenberg. Father of _the_ quantum machanics. His formulation parallels Erwin Schrodinger's in that, though they used different mathematical languages, they described the same thing. Heisenberg's so-called "matrix formulation" was made possible by his great collaborators, i.e., Jordan, Born and Bohr. He was in the German camp when the major forces concentrated their powers in developing the A-bomb. Heisenberg had thought an A-bomb was a theoretical impossibility. Philosophically, he was forever a disciple of Niels Bohr. With Bohr, he was the guru of an orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. Eugene Wigner. A mathematician who won a Nobel prize in physics. A classmate of J. von. Neumann. He had a kind and gentle personality (quite rare among famous physicists). Wigner was the man who gave a Ph.D. to E. Jaynes, who was doing research on QED under Oppenheimer and had some difficulties in accepting quantum mechanics. Wigner, too, had troubles with the Copenhagen Interpretation and presented a unique interpretation that takes consciousness into account. To most of us, known by his 3-j symbol. Too bad that Landau (a god figure in condensed matter physics) was not there to share his insights. | 
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