Physics is Fun and Free

If you're like me and The New York Times is your homepage, and if, like I do, you check out the most popular articles first, then you've already seen this one about Walter H. G. Lewin, internet Physics star. (When the The New Yorker shows up each week, do you read the cartoons and any article by David Sedaris right away, kind of like eating dessert first, lest you run out of time for the rest of the meal? Me too.)

I was never much of a Physics student. Although it might have been entertaining to contemplate the cockroach traveling on the edge of a record at 33 1/3 RPMs, calculating its rotational velocity was another matter altogether.

Apparently Professor Lewin makes Physics fascinating, understandable, engaging, beautiful. MIT makes it available to all of us for free online, along with bunches of other courses at OpenCourseWare . Sheer unadulterated enjoyment of learning.

And at the risk of being called ageist, I'd like to point out that Dr. Lewin is 71.