He blinded me with science


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He blinded me with science

With a flare for YouTube theatrics, online academic stars are winning over students of all ages

SARA RIMER

From Thursday's Globe and Mail

December 20, 2007 at 10:34 AM EST

Walter Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at MIT. Now he has emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

Prof. Lewin's videotaped physics lectures, free online through OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the United States and beyond who stuff his e-mail inbox with praise.

"Through your inspiring video lectures I have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL physics is, both astounding and simple," a 17-year-old from India e-mailed recently.

Steve Boigon, 62, a florist from San Diego, wrote, "I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-coloured eyes."

Prof. Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube's greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college websites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple's U.S. iTunes Store.

In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Prof. Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet, nerd safari garb, he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.

He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.

He was No. 1 on the most-downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that lineup constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford University in California.

Last week, Yale University put some of its most popular undergraduate courses and professors online free. The list includes Controversies in Astrophysics with Charles Bailyn, Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer and Introduction to the Old Testament with Christine Hayes.

MIT recently expanded on the success of its online classes by opening a site aimed at high-school students and teachers.

Judging from his fan e-mail, Prof. Lewin, who is among those featured on the new site, appeals to all ages. Some of his correspondents compare him with the late Richard Feynman, the free-spirited, bongo-playing Nobel laureate who popularized physics through his books, lectures and television appearances.

With his halo of wiry grayish-brown hair, his tortoiseshell glasses and his intensity, Prof. Lewin is the iconic brilliant scientist. But like the late Ms. Child was, he is at once larger than life and totally accessible.

"We have here the mother of all pendulums!" he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2, 170-pound (77-kilogram) self on a 13-kilogram steel ball attached to a pendulum hanging from the ceiling. He swings across the stage, holding himself nearly horizontal as his hair blows in the breeze he has created.

The point: that a period of a pendulum is independent of the mass - the steel ball, plus one professor - hanging from it.

"Physics works!" Prof. Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.

"Hi, Prof. Lewin!!" a fan who identified himself as a 17-year-old from China wrote. "I love your inspiring lectures and I love MIT!!!"

A fan who said he was a physics teacher from Iraq gushed: "You are now my Scientific Father. In spite of the bad occupation and war against my lovely IRAQ, you made me love USA because you are there and MIT is there."

Prof. Lewin revels in his fan mail and in the idea that he is spreading the love of physics. "Teaching is my life," he said.

The professor, who is from the Netherlands, said that teaching a required course in introductory physics to MIT students made him realize "that what really counts is to make them love physics, to make them love science."

He said he spent 25 hours preparing each new lecture, choreographing every detail and stripping out every extra sentence.

"Clarity is the word," he said.

Fun also matters. In another lecture on pendulums, he stands back against the wall, holding a steel ball at the end of a pendulum just beneath his chin. He has just demonstrated how potential energy turns into kinetic energy by sending the ball flying across the stage, shattering a pane of glass he had bolted to the wall.

Now he will demonstrate the conservation of energy. "I am such a strong believer in the conservation of energy that I am willing to risk my life for it," he says. "If I am wrong, then this will be my last lecture."

He closes his eyes, and releases the ball. It flies back and forth, stopping just short of his chin.

"Physics works!" Prof. Lewin shouts. "And I'm still alive!"

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/sto...ry/Science/home

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Prof. Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet, nerd safari garb, he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.

Now THAT is a teacher.

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