Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher

Six Easy Pieces collects six of the “easier” chapters from Richard Feynman’s famous 1961-63 Caltech physics lectures. His pieces cover atoms, energy, and quantum mechanics, and through it all Feynman demonstrates his ability to break down complicated subjects and explain them in simple language. ("Another way to remember [atoms'] size is this: if an apple is magnified to the size of the earth, then the atoms in the apple are approximately the size of the original apple.") This is one of Feynman's best physics books.