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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[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.
The showing was succesful. ...[T]he project went on to produce ...52 television programs and 3 volumes of textbooks, plus teacher's manuals, study guides... [etc.]... designed for... college level courses... [plus] complete... videos and print materials for... high schools. The program... cost nearly $10 million.
Sally told me... it cost about $75,000 to make a half-hour program. ...[T]he original grant was for $750,000. We eventually got $6 million... [P]art of the proposal... was to make a pilot program that cost hundreds of thousands... and took three years... And that was a make-or-break—either they accepted the pilot program or the project was dead. ...It became the second program in the series... "The Law of Falling Bodies." ...this absolutely beautiful pilot program ...which cost $350,000 ...everybody loved it and they said, “Go ahead.” ...And that meant ...classy computer animation and ...actors ...We did all kinds of things you just don’t do in educational television.
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The high-school editions... video modules, averaging 15 minutes... are accompanied by extensive written materials for the teacher, including suggestions, background material, demonstrations, and sample questions... [T]eachers are willing to work very hard to improve their skills... given reasonable support, and... even teachers who are well qualified... find new inspiration in... TMU.
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..."
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.