Where does a tree get its mass? Richard Feynman explains.
youtube.com
youtube.com
I am hoping that the internet and such things as OpenCourseware will allow college professors, teachers and more to become stars of teaching because they know how to communicate and make it fun.
These people should be compensated much more and be seen by many more people such as MIT's Walter Lewin, Feynman and many many others hidden in the fold of our current traditional education systems.
I'd let him.
I gave up studying physics in secondary school because my teacher was a disaster. Instead of trying to impart a deeper understanding of the subject matter in question, he would focus on getting student to learn off scientific definitions word for word (i.e. having all the "ands", "ats", "is'", "the's" in the correct place). So you would have a textbook answer memorized for the test (perhaps), but sweet fuck all actual knowledge of physics.
To see this kind of passion is refreshing, and the way things should be. (If you've ever seen 'The Wire', seasons 4 & 5 have 'Mr. Prezbo' teaching maths. He struggles to connect with his student until he teaches them how to apply probability theory to dice games, allowing them to gamble more effectively. Unfortunately for him, he also has to 'teach to the test' so that the school can say standardised test scores are going up).
You probably meant 'eager.'
Also, please don't do that here. :-)
Dick acted as a consultant for a company in Switzerland, which took him there every summer. About 1982 or so, I had business in Europe, and I met Dick in Geneva. We decided to kick around for several days. We did the shops and the countryside on the first day, and on the second day, he asked what I'd like to do. I said, "Well, if it isn't too much like a postman's holiday, I'd like to go over to CERN," which is the European particle accellerator, where so much particle physics is done, and where Dick used to work a number of years before. He said, "Sure." So we went over there, and Dick couldn't find his way around because the buildings had changed. We finally found our way in, and looked into a room where there were some physicists doing work on the blackboard. One of them spotted Feynman, and pretty soon there was a crowd gathered, and the director came in. He decided they'd take us on a tour. We went into a 007, James Bond cave underneath the ground, with all this wonderful high-technology equipment. There was a giant machine that was going to be rolled into the line of the particle accelerator. The machine was maybe the size of a two-story building, on tracks, with lights and bulbs and dials and scaffolds all around, with men climbing all over it.
Feynman said, "What experiment is this?"
The director said, "Why this is an experiment to test the change-change something-or-other under such-and-such circumstances." But he stopped suddenly, and he said, "I forgot! This is your theory of change-change, Dr. Feynman! This is an experiment to demonstrate, if we can, your theory of fifteen years ago, called so-and-so." He was a little embarrassed at having forgotten it.
Feynman looked at this big machine, and he said, "How much does this cost?" The man said, "Thirty-seven million dollars," or whatever it was.
And Feynman said, "You don't trust me?"
-- excerpted from "No Ordinary Genius" by Christopher Sykes
It maybe for brits only though... I'm sure there are ways around that.
A humbling exhortation, if ever there was one.
I loved reading his lectures (as opposed to the classes I was in) because he was interested in getting to the 'what's going on', not the 'here's the equation to know.' One of his autobiographies talks about his frustration in this area when he was talking about polarized light at a university outside the US. They had spent all day talking about polarized light in the classroom, but nobody could predict or explain what was going on when he took two polarized filters and stacked & rotated them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
That's a phenomenal video of him explaining how to ask questions. And does a great job explaining that, "Why?" questions aren't very good questions, without a context. And goes from there to 'everyday QED' with elegance and grace.
Fields arranged by purity: http://xkcd.com/435/