For the Love of Physics Read Free

clarity he brings to revealing the majesty of Newton’s laws, why the strings of a violin produce such beautifully resonant notes, and why you lose and gain weight, be it only very briefly, when you ride in an elevator.
    For his lectures, he always practiced at least three times in an empty classroom, with the last rehearsal being at five a.m. on lecture day. “What makes his lectures work,” says astrophysicist David Pooley, a former student who worked with him in the classroom, “is the time he puts into them.”
    When MIT’s Physics Department nominated Lewin for a prestigious teaching award in 2002, a number of his colleagues zeroed in on these exact qualities. One of the most evocative descriptions of the experience of learning physics from Lewin is from Steven Leeb, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems, who took his Electricity and Magnetism course in 1984. “He exploded onto the stage,” Leeb recalls, “seized us by the brains, and took off on a roller-coaster ride of electromagnetics that I can still feel on the back of my neck. He is a genius in the classroom with an unmatched resourcefulness for finding ways to make concepts plain.”
    Robert Hulsizer, one of Lewin’s Physics Department colleagues, tried to excerpt some of Lewin’s in-class demonstrations on video to make a kind of highlight film for other universities. He found the task impossible. “The demonstrations were so well woven into the developmentof the ideas, including a buildup and denouement, that there was no clear time when the demonstration started and when it finished. To my mind, Walter had a richness of presentation that could not be sliced into bites.”
    The thrill of Walter Lewin’s approach to introducing the wonders of physics is the great joy he conveys about all the wonders of our world. His son Chuck fondly recalls his father’s devotion to imparting that sense of joy to him and his siblings: “He has this ability to get you to see things and to be overwhelmed by how beautiful they are, to stir the pot in you of joy and amazement and excitement. I’m talking about little unbelievable windows he was at the center of, you felt so happy to be alive, in his presence, in this event that he created. We were on vacation in Maine once. It wasn’t great weather, I recall, and we kids were just hanging out, the way kids do, bored. Somehow my father got a little ball and spontaneously created this strange little game, and in a minute some of the other beach kids from next door came over, and suddenly there were four, five, six of us throwing, catching, and laughing. I remember being so utterly excited and joyful. If I look back and think about what’s motivated me in my life, having those moments of pure joy, having a vision of how good life can be, a sense of what life can hold—I’ve gotten that from my father.”
    Walter used to organize his children to play a game in the winter, testing the aerodynamic quality of paper airplanes—by flying them into the family’s big open living room fireplace. “To my mother’s horror,” Chuck recalled, “we would recover them from the fire—we were determined to win the competition the next time round!”
    When guests came for dinner, Walter would preside over the game of Going to the Moon. As Chuck remembers it, “We would dim the lights, pound our fists on the table making a drumroll kind of sound, simulating the noise of a rocket launch. Some of the kids would even go under the table and pound. Then, as we reached space, we stopped the pounding, and once we landed on the Moon, all of us would walk around the living room pretending to be in very low gravity, taking crazy exaggeratedsteps. Meanwhile, the guests must have been thinking, ‘These people are nuts!’ But for us kids, it was fantastic! Going to the Moon!”
    Walter Lewin has been taking students to the Moon since he first walked