It seems like not a week goes by without The New York Times writing a gushing profile about Coursera. It’s hard to believe, but back during another day, there was another darling of the open education movement. And his name was Walter Lewin. In a 2007 profile, the same New York Times called him “an international Internet guru” and highlighted his wildly popular physics courses recorded at MIT. Those courses — find them in our collection of Free Online Physics Courses, part of our collection of 825 Free Online Courses — were widely distributed through YouTube and iTunes. Now the MOOCs have come along, and Lewin isn’t letting himself get swept to the side. On February 18, Lewin and his MIT colleagues will launch a new course on edX called Electricity and Magnetism. Drawing on Lewin’s famous lecture series, Electricity and Magnetism will run 17 weeks, requiring students to put in about 9–12 hours per week. You can reserve your free seat in the course today and watch Lewin do what he does best.
Maybe you have wondered about it. Maybe you haven’t. But either way, astronaut Chris Hadfield answers the big question — how one goes to the bathroom in space.
Hadfield is currently aboard the International Space Station, where he’s actively tweeting about life in orbit. You can follow him on Twitter here (and find us here).
You have shown through your works, that it is possible to succeed without violence even with those who have not discarded the method of violence.
The letter long precedes the first atomic bombs and Einstein’s letters to F.D.R. warning of their development and use; though often discussed only in relation to the horrific events of World War II, the physicist’s opposition to violence and war was a longstanding passion for him. Einstein called his pacifism an “instinctive feeling” based only on his “deepest antipathy to every kind of cruelty and hatred,” rather than any “intellectual theory.” His politics often paralleled those of fellow intellectual giant and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell (the two collaborated on a 1955 “Manifesto” for peace).
Gandhi remained an important influence on Einstein’s life and thought. In the audio clip above from 1950, he again offers generous praise for the man known as “Mahatma” (great soul). In the recording, Einstein says of Gandhi:
I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha, which roughly translates as “devotion to the truth,” appealed to Einstein, perhaps, because of its principled stand against political expediency and for a kind of moral commitment that depended on self-scrutiny and inquiry into cause and effect. Like the counter-intuitive theories of Einstein and Russell, Gandhi biographer Mark Shepard writes that the concept of satyagraha is “a hard one to grasp”–Especially, “for those used to seeing power in the barrel of a gun.”
Though far from the most astute scholar of physics or zombie cinema, I have to believe that this marks the first time physicists have made a contribution to the field. But perhaps only they would think to set their movie inside the Large Hadron Collider, the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s particle accelerator of record-setting size and power. (Hands up if you even knew one could go inside it.) The device has received much press for its potential to either prove or disprove the existence of a predicted elementary particle called the Higgs boson, and Decay speculates about one particular consequence of this high-profile scientific quest: what if the Higgs boson turns people into zombies? Doing his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, writer-director Luke Thompson realized that — and here I quote the press release — “the tunnels under CERN would be ideal for a zombie film.” £2000, a couple borrowed cameras, and a great deal of scavenged props and improvised filmmaking gear later, we can watch the whole thing free online.
Thompson’s entry into the zombie canon follows “a small group of students (played by physicists) after a disastrous malfunction in the world’s biggest particle accelerator. As they try desperately to escape from the underground maintenance tunnels, they are hunted by the remains of a maintenance team, who have become less than human.” This use of actual young physicists running around the actual nooks and crannies of CERN lends the project a scrappy realism, and the practice of making do with any resource at hand has a proud history in zombie filmmaking. Recall that George A. Romero, shooting the genre-defining Night of the Living Dead (also free to watch on the internet), could only raise $6,000 at a time, which forced him to find horror wherever he could.Like every strong zombie picture, Decay not only operates on meager resources but performs a certain social satire as well, in this case to do with how the nonscientific world perceives science. But no need to take it too seriously: “This film has not been authorized or endorsed by CERN,” reads the first title card. “It is purely a work of fiction.” Whew.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Over the years the physicists behind the YouTube channel Sixty Symbols have answered some big questions — like what happens if you stick your hand inside the Large Hadron Collider? Or do physicists believe in God? But now these fine scientists from The University of Nottingham have brought physics to a level that I can personally appreciate. They’ve hit the streets of Dublin to demystify what goes into the finest of Irish libations, the perfect glass of Guinness Beer. Their inquiry starts with the most obvious question: What creates that thick beige froth that sits elegantly atop the dark brown stout? It sounds like a mundane question. Until you realize it’s not. The dynamics of Guinness foam can be explained partly by work done by the Irish physicist Lord Kelvin (1824–1907) long ago. But other aspects of Guinness foam are still being hotly contested by physicists today. Take for example this paper, Waves in Guinness, published in 2008 in the journal Physics of Fluids. Now we’ll let Sixty Symbols explain the rest.…
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A certain motion picture has as its main characters Joe DiMaggio, Joseph McCarthy, Albert Einstein, and Marilyn Monroe. Sure, the script calls them the Ballplayer, the Senator, the Professor, and the Actress, but there’s no mistaking their real identities. Surely this already intrigues anyone interested in midcentury American culture, but what if I also mentioned that in the director’s chair sits Nicolas Roeg, whose richly askew visions for Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, and The Man Who Fell to Earth so enriched the cinema of the seventies? Adapted from a stage play by Terry Johnson, 1985’s Insignificance has each of its iconic characters pass through a single New York City hotel room in 1954. Roughly halfway through the story, we get the scene above, an explanation of the theory of relativity: by the Actress to the Professor.
Marilyn Monroe’s interest in things Einsteinian seems at least somewhat grounded in reality; Johnson thought up the play after reading about an autographed photo of the physicist found among the late star’s possessions. Roeg felt a similarly strong reaction upon watching the stage production, seizing the material as an opportunity to explore the theme of how “nobody knows a damn thing about anyone.” This he especially illustrated in the distant marriage of the Actress and the Ballplayer, their real-life inspirations having been briefly married themselves. (In the role of the Actress Roeg cast Theresa Russell, his own then-wife.) Though not Roeg’s best-known film, Insignificance has nonetheless inspired a constant stream of academic and cinephilic discussion since its release, and it received a handsome Criterion Collection edition last year. And if I had my way, I’d encourage both film and physics teachers everywhere to fire it up on slow class days.
Albert Einstein is the patron saint of slackers redeemed. We’ve all heard some version of his late-bloomer story: “You know, Albert Einstein did terribly in high school” (says every high school guidance counselor at some point). Most of us normals like to see him this way—it bucks us up—even if he was anything but your average low achiever. The above 2006 profile of Einstein by PBS’s “American Masters” documentary series, Albert Einstein: How I See the World, takes the opposite tack, surrounding him with the aura of a hero in a Hermann Hesse novel. The film begins with William Hurt’s narration of Einstein’s solo trek through the Alps at twenty-two, during which he “longed to grasp the hidden design, the underlying principles of nature.” Over the intrigue conjured by Michael Galasso’s haunting, minimalist score and a montage of black-and-white nature films, narrator Hurt intones:
Every once in a while there comes a man who is able to see the universe in a totally new way, whose vision upsets the very foundations of the world as we know it. Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would look for this harmony, not only in his science, but in the world of men. The world wanted to know Albert Einstein, yet he remained a mystery to those who only saw his public face and perhaps to himself as well. “What does a fish know of the water in which he swims?” he asked himself.
After this sententious beginning, with its strangely outdated pronoun use, Hurt tells us that those who knew Einstein best saw a little of him, and the film goes on to document those impressions in interviews: colleague Abraham Pais comments on Einstein’s love of Jewish humor (and that his laughter sounded like “the bark of a contented seal”). Hanna Loewy, a family friend, describes his ability to look at “many, many dimensions, whether they be proven or not,” and to see the whole. Intercut between these statements is archival footage of Einstein himself and commentary from Hurt, some of it questionable (for example, the idea that Einstein was a “scientist who believed in God” is tendentious, at best, but a subject best left for the endless bickering of YouTube commenters).
It’s a bit of an Olympian treatment, fitting to the subject in some respects. But in another sense, the documentary performs the function of a hagiography, a genre well-suited for encomium and reverence, but not for “getting to know” its subject personally. The film places a great deal of emphasis, rightly perhaps, on Einstein’s public persona: his vocal pacifism—in which he joined with Mahatma Gandhi—and statements against German militarism, even as the rising fascist order dismissed his work and denounced the man.
But while Albert Einstein: How I See the World provides a compelling portrait and offers a wealth of historical context for understanding Einstein’s world, it leaves out the voices of those who perhaps knew him best: his children, wife Elsa, or his first wife, Mileva. (Their divorce gets a brief mention at 15:20, along with his subsequent marriage to first cousin Elsa.) Einstein’s troubled personal life, revealed through private correspondence like an angry post-divorce letter to Mileva and an appalling list of demands written to her during the deterioration of their marriage, has received more scrutiny of late. These personal details have perhaps prompted PBS to reevaluate Mileva’s influence; rather than “little more than a footnote” in his biography, Mileva may have played a role in his success for which she never received credit, giving Hurt’s gendered narration something of a bitter personal twist.
None of this is to say that a documentary treatment of any public figure needs to dredge the family secrets and display the dirty laundry, but as far as learning how Einstein, or anyone else of his stature, saw the world, the personal seems to me as relevant as the professional. PBS’s documentary is very well-made, however, and worth watching for its production values, interviews with Einstein’s friends and colleagues, and archival newsreel footage, even if it sometimes fails to truly illuminate its subject. But as Hurt’s narration disclaims at the outset, maybe Einstein was a mystery, even to himself.
The film will be added to the Documentary section of our collection of Free Movies Online.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked by the Templeton Foundation to answer the unanswerable question “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” He read his answer aloud, and Minute Physics helped animate it. If you head to the Templeton Foundation web site, you can find replies by other leading intellectuals, including Lawrence Krauss, Jane Goodall, and Elie Wiesel.
For more pearls of wisdom from Tyson, check out the following:
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