The showing was succesful. ...[T]he project went on to produce ...52 television programs and 3 volumes of textbooks, plus teacher's manuals, study gu… - David Goodstein

The raw material for... both the television programs and the textbooks... was a set of verbatim transcripts of the lectures delivered by Goldstein in the revised Caltech physics course. ...[T]he material would be would be presented at two levels, at least in the textbooks if not in the television programs. The upper level... for physics and engineering majors... [t]he other textbook, which corresponds to the level of the television programs... for a more general audience. Nevertheless, it... include[d] differential and integral calculus... presented as they had arisen historically... as part of... mechanics. Mastering... simple... s and s would make physics easier to understand than... the pseudocalculus... in many college physics courses. ...Liberal Arts students had little difficulty learning calculus. ...[T]his was a "major pedagogic triumph" ...A primer, written by Apostol ...was added to the ...arsenal of aids ...

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.

Physics is not a newcomer to televised education. The first televised physics lecture dates... to the 1930s. A remarkable number of today's American research physicists—particularly... from rural and poorer sections of the country—trace their interest... to the... in the 1960s. The Mechanical Universe follows in that tradition...