williamhathaway.com

There is a course at UC Berkeley called Physics for Future Presidents that is really interesting. You can listen to it for free via audio or video podcasts and the professor uses lots of neat examples that bring to life a variety of topics. The class uses very minimal math, so if don’t be scared away by a fear of complex equations.

Here are some neat stories/facts that I picked up while listening to the classes:

• A chocolate chip cookie has a lot more energy by weight than dynamite
• The solar energy that can be captured in a square meter is approximately 1 horse power
• There are sound channels in the atmosphere and ocean which carry sounds thousands of miles, allowing for some really cool uses like rescuing downed pilots or detecting nuclear tests

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the class.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 1:15 pm and is filed under education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.