Under the title Project Tuva, Microsoft has posted a series of classic physics lectures by Manhattan Project collaborator Richard Feynman for free on the web, and in the space of an hour they’ve become one of my all time favourite things.

They’re brilliant. Feynman has a lovely delivery that sweeps you along, together with a depth of understanding that allows him to strip a difficult concept down to its simple foundations, without needing to dumb it down. He just knows the right door to open in order to usher you quickly into his world.

Even if you’ve little interest in the topics under discussion, it’s well worth spending a few hours in Feynman’s company for the entertainment value. He’s a genuinely funny man able to express his science with a poet’s turn of phrase.

What’s really special though is how Microsoft has presented these lectures. It could simply have posted them on the site and everybody would have been happy – after all, Bill Gates used his own money to track them down, buy the rights and digitise them. Instead though, they’ve been enhanced with some truly wonderful technology.

There’s optional audio commentary from physics professors and experts, text commentary for the hearing impaired, and an ability to add your own notes to specific sections of the lecture. A timeline beneath the video allows you to easily spin to the section you want, but it’s also peppered with additional content, including detailed information on people and theories briefly mentioned by Feynman. There’s definitions of natural laws, written formulas and, in a couple of cases, an explanation of a joke you may not have gotten.

Also superb is that whenever Feynman mentions a constellation or spatial anomaly a link will take you to Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope so you can go and take a look for yourself. It’s so brilliantly designed and wonderfully implemented it’s quite obviously a labour of love. It’s also precisely how I want to see historical information presented and updated.

Unfortunately, the site only appears to be accessible through Internet Explorer [UPDATE: it seems this is only me, go enjoy it on Firefox, too]