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 chai… - David Goodstein

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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.

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About David Goodstein

(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.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: David Louis Goodstein
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Additional quotes by David Goodstein

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..."

[A] program is devoted to Millikan's oil-drop experiment, partly as an application of Newton's second law, and... to induce... philosophical ideas about how science is... done. ...The solution ...create a ..."Millikan Museum" ...in the Norman Bridge Laboratory where he had worked. The set involved thousands of artifacts, many ...Millikan's own ...After ...shooting ...the museum was disassembled, to live on only on videotape.

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