Audio lecture finished

[johnridley]

Great Ideas in Classical Physics (TTC)

vanishingly little math, good overview / history of the development of physics. Pretty short series, 24 x 30 minute courses. I learned some new (to me) history. No new physics, but I didn't expect to.

Comments

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there wasn't any actual math in this course. It was just an introduction to concepts. f=ma, and discussing how, if you double the force, you're therefore doubling the acceleration on the same mass, etc. The most complex it got was to discuss a semi truck going 60 striking a motionless car, and the resulting mass continuing on at 55 MPH, and calculating the relative masses of the car and truck. I'm pretty sure anyone (or at least, anyone who's likely to be listening to this lecture) can follow it.

What I enjoyed was the history; which of the big guys were contemporaries, which were building on each other's work. Being a classical physics course, the physicists (at least, the 18th/19th century ones) were a gallery of unit names; Watt, Joule, Newton, Ampere, Coloumb, plus Galileo, Maxwell, Copernicus, etc.

He did a pretty good job of relating how things that seem obvious to us now weren't really that easy to think up given the general beliefs of the times. I think that's important; students should realize that generally accepted beliefs are sometimes totally wrong, and you've got to be willing to let go if compelling evidence comes along.