But apparently MIT’s Walter H.G. Lewin is the all-star: “Professor Lewin delivers his lectures with the panache of Julia Child bringing French cooking to amateurs and the zany theatricality of YouTube

Tim: yes that’s what I meant by the “lecture schedule” for Death turned me off; there’s no way I’m spending four class sessions on “arguments for the existence of the soul” and then three more on “arguments for the immortality of the soul”.

Two highlights from the first astrophysics lecture:

We tell these nice anecdotes and we put them in the textbooks too; in the little bars that go down the side of the textbook, where you get the head and shoulder shot of the famous dead white male scientist and so forth. And then we tell these stories. And the historians of science hate this because it isn’t actually what happened. Nevertheless, we persist in telling these stories, and I’ve been thinking about why that is. I think the way to think about this is what these stories are, are fables. And like any fable, the point is not that the story is true. The point is that it vividly illustrates a moral, which tells you how to behave or how not to behave and they’re useful for that reason. You’ll recall the famous fable of the ant and the grasshopper. Grasshopper sings and plays and dances all summer long. The ant is very industrious, piles up food, doesn’t have any fun. But then in the winter, the grasshopper starves and the ant does fine. If an entomologist were to come along and say but that’s not how ants and grasshoppers behave, you would correctly say that he’s missed the whole point. And the point is that it’s just a nice story which illustrates certain kinds of behaviors and whether they’re good or bad. So, here’s what I’m going to do; I’m going to tell these stories, but I’m going to label them fables and I’m going to point out the morals explicitly. And the optional paper is going to be: go and take any one of these things and find out what really happened and comment somewhat on the implications of the real story for science.

I should say that the biggest of these fables is probably the one about Galileo and the Catholic Church, where the Catholic Church oppresses the pioneering scientist and the scientist stands firm against this huge impersonal bureaucracy, and the establishment trying to squelch them and so forth. The truth of that is actually very subtle and very interesting and I can’t go into it now, among other things because I’m not a historian of science, I’m not the best person to talk about it, but check that out sometime.

And:

What is the orbital period of Jupiter in years? Obviously, that’s going to equal the square root of 125. Here’s another trick. What’s the square root of 125? Quickly? Good, more decimals? You could type it into your calculator though and find out, but let me make a suggestion. Don’t take the square root of 125; take the square root of 121 instead. What’s the square root of 121? 11. Much easier, right? And notice this, a of Jupiter is approximately five, so 53 is approximately 125, and it’s just as good to say 121 is equal to the square root–the square of the period, and P equals 11 years. That’s the orbital period of Jupiter.

All right, so now, I’m aware that many of you are shopping the course today and may not be back for future lectures. And so, I want for those people who have decided against this that they’ll do something far more worthwhile with their time, I want to leave you with something you can carry through your life from your brief experience with Astronomy 160. And that is the following piece of advice: Don’t take the square root of 125, take the square root of 121. It’s much easier. This is what the business people call thinking outside the box. Don’t do the stupid hard thing. Do the thing that is just as good but requires some thought first in order to make it easy. So, I will leave you with that, the rest of you I’ll see you on Thursday morning.

I thought some of the MIT ones looked pretty good too. Anyone know good online courses in diff eq, special equations, optics, quantum electrodynamics, or music theory?

I bet this is what Slate will do next (after “Blogging the Bible” and their book club/TV show conversations).