not by the book

Those who can, teach:

That’s 71-year-old professor Walter H. G. Lewin teaching a physics class at MIT. You can take his class online, at MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which the online version of the New York Times article from which I learned this doesn’t even bother to link to, because the online folks at the NYT are obviously retards.

“We have here the mother of all pendulums!” he declares, hoisting his 6-foot-2, 170-pound self on a 30-pound 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 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!” Professor Lewin shouts, as the classroom explodes in cheers.

The strongest praise comes from an Iraqi physics teacher:

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.”

More about OpenCourseWare here.