Comments on: The Mechanical Universe on Demand

The Mechanical Universe on Demand

FuturisticDragon — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:52:08 -0800

The Mechanical Universe...and Beyond is a critically-acclaimed series of 52 thirty-minute videotape programs covering the basic topics of an introductory university physics course. This well produced and highly informative 52 episode series, hosted by David Goodstein of Caltech, is available as Video on Demand (Note: simple registration required to view videos).

This series is an excellent combination of physics history, theoretical description, mathematical formulation using computer graphics and in class demonstrations.

By: DU

DU — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:00:30 -0800

omgomgomgomg I watched this series on PBS as a kid and was blown away by the graphics. Not just as a technical feat but also with how clear they made everything. My dad taped them at the time and copied them to CD for me a few years ago and I still get goosebumps when they derive the instantaneous velocity of a falling body for reasons I can't even explain¹. The animated equations...yes. Unfortunately my copies are pretty crappy (broadcast -> VHS + 20 years -> CD) so this is awesome news. ¹Or maybe I can: I am a nerd.

By: SteelyDuran

SteelyDuran — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:07:52 -0800

Fantastic! Absolutely terrific. Between this and MIT's OCW (Walter Lewin's excellent and entertaining 8.01 Classical Mechanics lectures and 8.02 Electricity and Magnetism lectures, I'm continually delighted by physics and electricity. It's things like these that make me more hungry for knowledge than ever before. Great post. THanks for turning me on to this great series.

By: Skorgu

Skorgu — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:11:47 -0800

The DVD rips are available on your finer bittorrent trackers as well. It's a darn good thing I've got more hard drives in the mail.

By: SteelyDuran

SteelyDuran — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:14:12 -0800

On a side note: What's a good resource for learning math?

By: Turtles all the way down

Turtles all the way down — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:19:23 -0800

1Or maybe I can: I am a nerd. Intellectual goosebumps are a rare and beautiful thing, to be treasured indeed.

By: DU

DU — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:22:39 -0800

What's a good resource for learning math? I took calculus in college but never really understood it. (I could take derivatives and find integrals and whatnot, but couldn't apply them to a problem.) Then I worked through a basic undergraduate course in physics. The example problems essentially teach you practical calculus at the same time as physics, so now I understand both much better. If you need to learn algebra first, maybe not such a great place to start.

By: nicolas léonard sadi carnot

nicolas léonard sadi carnot — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:26:14 -0800

Steely: Paul's Online Math Notes is a clear, though pretty dense, run through introductory university maths.

By: nola

nola — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:11:18 -0800

This is great thank you so much for posting.

By: pantsrobot

pantsrobot — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:26:43 -0800

These are awesome. If only I'd known about it while I was still taking Physics :(

By: Slothrup

Slothrup — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:32:52 -0800

Goodstein was my freshman physics prof. I seem to recall that ours was the first class for which these materials were used in their finished form. Ah, those were the days...

By: e.e. coli

e.e. coli — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:52:02 -0800

Yay! Yay! Yay! Point of interest: Goodstein was a colleague of Feynman's in his latter days, and was surely pedagogically influenced by him.

By: sdodd

sdodd — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:01:12 -0800

Watching these as a kid led me to later realize that I benefit from a visual style of instruction. I, too, was blown away at the concision with which they were able to express complex or unintuitive ideas in physics and math.

By: starkeffect

starkeffect — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:06:55 -0800

Yippee! I show these to my students regularly (I teach college physics) off of my old videotapes, taped off PBS from the late 80's, which are rapidly degrading with age. Thanks!

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:09:52 -0800

Nth OMG, OMG, OMG... I watched these on the old big 12' or so satellite dishes. It managed to teach me enough to get into the Young Engineering and Science Scholars program at Caltech to study Physics for a summer. High School teacher was dumbfounded by the hats on my i,j,k and all the dx/dy stuff and made me sit in the corner most of the time. Ended up scoring second highest score ever on the Navy Nuke Test, they wanted to sign me up for sub duty. Was going to be a Physics major until I found out that the 3 volume book we did that summer was 3 semesters. Went ComSci instead. Excellent show, and now the standard answer for any "teach me physics" questions. You rock!

By: fatllama

fatllama — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:25:10 -0800

Sweet. These are great.

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:32:22 -0800

Totally sweet, first mms link in asx file is my uni. Work is wasted for a while.

By: 5MeoCMP

5MeoCMP — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:51:24 -0800

N^m-thing OMG. Really looking forward to watching these -- but I have to wait a whole week until my (now capped) monthly bandwidth limit resets! Waaah!

By: FuturisticDragon

FuturisticDragon — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:57:00 -0800

Each and every one of these is packed full of history, mathematical insight, witty remarks (on behalf of Prof. Goodstein), excellent visual analogies and physical intuition -- but my favorites are: 13. Conservation of Energy 15. Conservation of Momentum 29. The Electric Field 35. The Magnetic Field 39. Maxwell's Equations 45. Temperature and Gas Laws 46. Engine of Nature 47. Entropy

By: The Tensor

The Tensor — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:42:53 -0800

In about 1987, I went on a tour of JPL (with my high school Math Club!) and they showed us a computer graphics demo reel that included a lot of Mechanical Universe footage. It was very tongue-in-cheek -- I particularly remember the part where the narrator said, "And now, because this is JPL...more gratuitous animation of Saturn!"

By: peppito

peppito — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:08:14 -0800

I remember these. Thanks for posting this. Not that it is important, but if anybody knows, I'm curious: were the classroom scenes done at caltech or at the nearby community college as I've heard?

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:54:09 -0800

Purely enecdotal evidence, but I think I sat in the same room, or another very like it. Like in Real Genius, tunnels are real, we found and explored them, got chased by the cops a couple of times. Crazy stuff written on the walls underground, found an old bottle of beer by following clues. Friggin' laser in the house library, cut open standard aluminum cans with it. Nearby CC is Pasadena CC, don't know what classrooms there look like. But classroom looks exactly like where I spent a summer.

By: johnjoe

johnjoe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:03:58 -0800

Yay Ph.1! I actually liked this guy's way of putting things so much I bought two copies of his text: one to get grubby through use during the quarter on mechanics, and one to keep pristine for my old age reading. I eventually ended up marrying someone who also went to Tech and so for a while I think there were 3 or 4 copies of this freshman physics book bouncing about our home, (with probably 4 sets of Feynman lectures around too). Ok, I just cracked it open and found one of my favorite quotes, after discussing Millikan's famously colorful lab notebook, and various issues involving biases we introduce when deciding which data points to be skeptical about, etc. "Much is written in textbooks about the scientific method, especially that picking the results you like is a cardinal sin. Don't believe everything you read. Science is a difficult and subtle business, and there is no method that assures success." Wow. Should scientists pay more attention to data points that surprise them, even though that obviously introduces bias?(*) What a rich and challenging thing to run into in one's first real physics text. (*) I don't know, I'm a theorist but I suspect so. I definitely pay more attention to surprising minus signs then otherwise. Actually I pay a lot more attention to surprising real numbers than I do to surprising integers, but still, there ya go.

By: DU

DU — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:54:00 -0800

Should scientists pay more attention to data points that surprise them, even though that obviously introduces bias?(*) I don't think it's even that simple. I work as a software engineer for a researcher and he has an uncanny ability to smell the difference between surprising data that is junk and surprising data that is interesting. The times he tells me to throw away the top and bottom N% vs the times he tells me to be especially sure to keep the top and bottom N% are unfathomable. He has a little daemon feeding him stats on unseen data. It's incredible but also frustrating, because I'll run a bunch of queries and write a bunch of scripts and then find out that his barely-thought-out guess was spot-on and I could have saved days. Or worse, after all that time, I go back and re-read his instructions and finally realize what he was telling me.

By: neuron

neuron — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:16:30 -0800

Physics demonstrations by Julius Sumner Miller on the Youtubes.

By: wildcrdj

wildcrdj — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 19:24:19 -0800

We used these in my HS physics class and I remember liking them. Then, I got to Caltech and walked into Ph1... and deja vu! (I didn't know when watching them in high school where they were made, so it was kind of a surprise). Anyways, these are pretty good for "laypeople", especially with the Magic Voice (equation solver thing).

By: johnjoe

johnjoe — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:12:34 -0800

DU: the case of your researcher sounds more like someone making cuts on data to exclude unwanted but good events, i.e. true data but data about the irrelevant (i.e. tossing muon events when I only want to look at e+e-). This makes sense, you want to identify the data relevant to the questions you're asking, and you probably learned a lot by doing the queries you did to justify these decisions to yourself (one hopes?). I'm talking about when you expend energy looking for a good reason to tag data as inappropriate after being surprised (as Millikan did when he saw mass measurement very different from where he expected it). There are subtle issues here. The problem is one naturally doesn't expend the same amount of energy justifying when things are where you expect it, so we've introduced a selection bias. But this is a necessary part of living, the journals aren't full of noise from when the dude next door generated a power fluctuation: you don't report every piece of data you collect, but you do justify why you discard data.

By: malusmoriendumest

malusmoriendumest — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 04:28:00 -0800

"Due to licensing agreements, viewing of the video The Mechanical Universe...and Beyond - Introduction is restricted to network connections in the United States and Canada. Your connection appears to be based outside this area. If that is not the case, send a message to broadband@learner.org. Please include your machine's IP number or the external (internet side) IP number of your proxy server, if you are using one." Much angry muttering. Looks great, though.

By: jimmyjimjim

jimmyjimjim — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 19:28:59 -0800

they're up (and downloadable) on GUBA http://tinyurl.com/2zn6ec