When I was vice chair of the faculty, the chair... was Robbie Vogt... As soon as he stepped down... and I became chair of the faculty, he became chair of the PMA division, and he called me into his office... in 1979. We had been teaching from the Feynman physics books... using them as textbooks ever since Feynman had given the lectures, from '62 to '64. ...[T]hey had just gotten too hard. It was great for the teachers; I loved teaching from his books. But for the students—if you didn’t already know physics, trying to learn physics from those books... Seeing physics with fresh eyes all over again, it’s wonderful—that’s why every scientist in the world owns a set of these books... [b]ut to learn it for the first time from those books is just impossible. You basically need to know physics, in order to appreciate them.
American physicist (1939–2024)
(April 5, 1939 – April 10, 2024) was an American physicist and served as professor of physics and as Vice-provost at the . He wrote several books, including (1996). In the 1980s he was the director and host of , an educational television series on physics that was adapted for high school use and translated into many other languages. The series garnered more than a dozen prestigious awards, including the 1987 Japan Prize for television.
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Alternative Names:
David Louis Goodstein
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There are 25,000 high schools in the United States... and the number of qualified high school physics teachers... in the range of 2,000 to 4,000. So most high schools do not have anybody qualified... and physics is taught in most high schools. ...Many of the so-called crossover teachers, who were teaching physics but weren’t trained ...were teachers. Home economics had fallen out of favor.
[T]he primary audience was to be the "nontraditional student," especially "distance learners,"... [I]t was hoped that with a resourceful, dedicated local teacher... the teaching of introductory physics at any level could be enriched... [A]lso... that a large, casual, nonstudent audience would watch... for pleasure and instruction. ...[T]hat ideal target audience was the high-school physics teacher.
Let me be more explicit about the differences between a conventional telecourse and The Mechanical Universe. In the conventional course, the production company begins by convening a panel of hired academic consultants. ...Courses ...are basically education by committee, with the crucial job of teaching mainly in the hands of scriptwriters and producers. But... college education is to give... the benefit of learning from people who have spent a lifetime mastering their subjects and... adding new knowledge... The crucial part is organizing a subject and seeing the connections... precisely what telecourses entrust to scriptwriters. ...The Mechanical Universe ...arises out of a real physics course at a real—and excellent—university. It represents a single, unified vision of what physics is about, and how it's connected to its roots in mathematics, history and society. ...[N]ew techniques for had to be invented.
I... remember one morning at... breakfast, reading the ... story that had given $10 million a year for fifteen years to make telecommunications materials for higher education. ...[H]e created ...the Annenberg CPB Foundation ...to give out Annenberg’s money. ...I ...got in touch with Sally Beaty and ...KCET ...and we wrote a proposal. ...KCET ...was on the verge of going belly-up. And they tried to load the entire overhead of the station on our project. ...[W]e got the award—with KCET not involved. ...[N]ow we had no flagship station, but we had the money ...
The lack of qualified high-school physics teachers in the United States is a notorious (and self-perpetuating) problem. ...[C]ombating that problem was... one of the central goals of the TMU project. ...The idea was to induce teachers to study the college-level version so ...they could use the high-school materials ...with poise and confidence.
Robbie... asked me to create the new physics course—at least the first year of the new physics course. And I said, “Robbie, when you were chair of the faculty, you asked for complete teaching relief. Now I’m going to be chair... and you’re giving me the hardest teaching job in the whole institution. Don’t you think that’s a little unfair?" We... cut a deal... full financial support for a postdoc so I could hire somebody to help me on my research group while I was doing all this.
[N]obody ever made a million dollars on .
Five years after the series went public, we got a letter ...saying, "You’ve crossed the threshold. You now share in the revenues." ...But by then, there were no more revenues. ...I didn’t care ...That wasn’t the purpose ...Later on, we applied to the for an additional $3 million to turn out a high school version ...without calculus.
The problem of how to present detailed mathematical derivations is confronted... in the animated scenes. ...The comprimise solution... invented while designing the pilot program, is called the "algebraic ballet." ...done in detail, but rapidly and entertainingly. The viewer was not expected to absorb every detail... [b]ut every step was displayed... [A]ttention is never lost during these [rapid] mathematical passages.
[T]he earlier Feynman course had sought to makes physics exciting by relating... to contemporary... problems. The new course took the opposite tack... to recreate the historical excitement of the original discovery. ...[C]lassical mechanics ...is treated as the discovery of "our place in the universe." ...[I]ts climax is Newton's solution of the . ...[H]istorical recreations ...became a staple of the project.
Intellectually, technically and philosophically, physics and television are two separate cultures with almost no bridges between... [I]t is... time consuming and arduous... to span the gap... [T]here is no one... [at] Caltech... capable of reading, much less writing, a television script competently. ...[T]here is no one on the production side who knows enough... physics... to plan an important sequence, much less write a script or produce a program. This situation is a symptom of the malady of science illiteracy that is intended to help cure..."