Einstein in 60 Seconds (or 40 Hours)

BigThink asked Dr. Michio Kaku to sum up Einstein’s legacy in a nutshell. Above, you get his attempt in a quick minute. Obviously, this is just beginning to scratch the surface, and knowing you, you want to go deeper. So here you go: Leonard Susskind, a world famous physicist, offered a series of six courses for Stanford Continuing Studies, which traced the arc of modern physics. It goes from Newton to Black Holes. Naturally a tour of modern physics wouldn’t be complete without spending a good amount of time on Einstein, and that’s what Susskind does. One course (runs about 20 hours) is dedicated to Special Relativity (iTunes – YouTube) and the other focuses exclusively on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (iTunes – YouTube). This series of courses (all permanently found in the Physics section of our Free Online Course collection) has been enjoyed by viewers across the world, and we (at Stanford) have recently shipped CDs of the course to remote places with minimal bandwidth, including Nepal and Afghanistan. For more on how to learn physics online (for free, of course), see our post: Modern Physics: A Complete Introduction.