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The Mechanical Universe

When I was in school I enjoyed immensely a program called The Mechanical Universe. It is a series of lectures on physics and each lecture starts out in a class room (The series was produced at the California Institute of Technology) with the professor introducing a concept. Then the lecture takes off and uses historical reconstruction, demonstrations and animations to explain the concept.

The humor and drama conveyed were great at holding my interest, and this multimodal method stuck in my mind much better than dry textbooks.

The Mechanical Universe remains in my memory as one of the better uses of television. It has been made with public money and I am happy to see that you can stream the video to your computer from learner.org.
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