For the Physics Geeks

[dirkterrell]

Shea, you'll like this. Microsoft has put a series of Feynman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman)'s lectures online. You'll have to install a browser plugin to view them but it's worth it.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

Dirk

[CaptGoodvibes]

Oh hell yeah! I've read a couple of his books and the movie Infinity(1996) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116635/), starring Matthew Broderick as Richard Feynman is really good.

[gtn]

Dick Feynman is one of my heroes. I've watched his lectures from other sources. I think many people would benefit from a dose of Feynman.

I think my favorite segment of the lectures was his discussion of the function of a mirror from a quantum mechanics perspective. This was from a series he did at the University of Auckland.

[bodhizafa]

It would be nice to have more people like him and Brian Greene and so on to help people without science backgrounds to maybe understand more. Good communicators of complex stuff.

[gtn]

It would be nice to have more people like him and Brian Greene and so on to help people without science backgrounds to maybe understand more. Good communicators of complex stuff.

It would be really great to have someone with his communications skills as the national science advisor.

[dirkterrell]

Dick Feynman is one of my heroes. I've watched his lectures from other sources. I think many people would benefit from a dose of Feynman.


Likewise. I always admired his "active irresponsibility" when it came to the bs management stuff that took time away from doing science.

Dirk

[dirkterrell]

It would be nice to have more people like him and Brian Greene and so on to help people without science backgrounds to maybe understand more. Good communicators of complex stuff.

One thing I miss greatly in my current job is teaching. And the courses I used to love to teach were not, as you might think, the advanced ones for science majors and grad students. It was the ones for freshman who were not science/engineering majors. They were scared, apprehensive, sometimes angry about having to take a science class that "wasn't going to be any relevance to them." I absolutely ate that up. :) I would go in and for about the first 5 minutes of the first class, I would scare the shit out of them. Then it would transition to humor about those first 5 minutes and they would laugh and relax. Then I would let them show me that they already knew how to do the calculations I was writing on the board in the first five minutes, they just had never thought about it in a structured way. They realized that maybe this science thing wasn't so bad after all. That first 15 minutes or so was very carefully crafted and set the stage for a semester of fun. Teaching was incredibly gratifying for me and apparently for the students, based on their feedback at the end of the semester. I have always said that teaching is a performance art and people like Feynman realized that. I really do miss it.

Dirk

[Shea]

Shea, you'll like this. Microsoft has put a series of Feynman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman)'s lectures online. You'll have to install a browser plugin to view them but it's worth it.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html

Dirk

bah, runtime error on the link :(

[dirkterrell]

bah, runtime error on the link :(

Well, it is Microsoft after all. :)

Dirk