At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star

Walter H. G. Lewin, 71, a physics professor, has long had a cult following at M.I.T. And he has now emerged as an international Internet guru, thanks to the global classroom the institute created to spread knowledge through cyberspace.

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Professor Lewin’s videotaped physics lectures, free online on the OpenCourseWare of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have won him devotees across the country and beyond who stuff his e-mail in-box with praise.

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Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube’s greatest hits. He is part of a new generation of academic stars who hold forth in cyberspace on their college Web sites and even, without charge, on iTunes U, which went up in May on Apple’s iTunes Store.

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In his lectures at ocw.mit.edu, Professor Lewin beats a student with cat fur to demonstrate electrostatics. Wearing shorts, sandals with socks and a pith helmet — nerd safari garb — he fires a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall.

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He rides a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off.

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He was No. 1 on the most downloaded list at iTunes U for a while, but that lineup constantly evolves. The stars this week included Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind, a professor of quantum mechanics at Stanford.

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Last week, Yale put some of its most popular undergraduate courses and professors online free. The list includes Controversies in Astrophysics with Charles Bailyn, Modern Poetry with Langdon Hammer and Introduction to the Old Testament with Christine Hayes.

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M.I.T. recently expanded its online classes by opening a site aimed at high school students and teachers. Judging from his fan e-mail, Professor Lewin, who is among those featured on the new site, appeals to students of all ages.

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Some of his correspondents compare him to Richard Feynman, the free-spirited, bongo-playing Nobel laureate who popularized physics through his books, lectures and television appearances.

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This article relates to Charlie Munger's Mental Model approach to life and learning, of course. From Mr. Munger's 1994 speech:

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You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience - both vicarious and direct - o­n this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience o­n a latticework of models in your head.

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What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models - because if you just have o­ne or two that you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine.

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It's like the old saying, "To the man with o­nly a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." And of course, that's the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that's a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you've got to have multiple models.

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And the models have to come from multiple disciplines - because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in o­ne little academic department. That's why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their heads. So you've got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

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You may say, "My God, this is already getting way too tough. "But, fortunately, it isn't that tough - because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, o­nly a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.

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Books Related to Physics:

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Mr Tompkins in Paperback
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Einstein: His Life and Universe
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Isaac Newton
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Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
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What Do You Care What Other People Think?
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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
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Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher
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Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time

In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality
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The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century