World Science U Lets You Take Free Physics Courses from Leading Minds in the Field

Two years ago, World Sci­ence U debuted on the net, promis­ing to bring free sci­ence cours­es to any­one, from high school­ers to retirees. (We wrote about it here.) The cours­es would be taught by the top sci­en­tists in their fields, fea­tur­ing lec­tures, ani­ma­tions, inter­ac­tive exer­cis­es, feed­back, and even vir­tu­al office hours. At the time, how­ev­er, Bri­an Greene’s project to bring the lat­est in research on string the­o­ry, par­ti­cle physics, dark ener­gy, rel­a­tiv­i­ty and more fea­tured only two cours­es.

Since then, World Sci­ence U has tak­en off. It now offers “Sci­ence Unplugged,” a series of short videos that offer answers to layper­son ques­tions about sci­ence; “Mas­ter Class­es” which are short class­es about var­i­ous sub­jects (most­ly in physics) that take a few hours to com­plete; and “Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es” which take eight to ten weeks to com­plete and are designed for the more advanced learn­er. These lat­ter two offer­ings offer cer­tifi­cates upon com­ple­tion.

The cur­rent ros­ter of lec­tures is impres­sive: MIT’s Alan Guth teach­es Infla­tion­ary Cos­mol­o­gy; U. Chicago’s Michael Turn­er (who coined the term “dark ener­gy”) presents the Dark Side of the Uni­verse; Stan­ford’s Andrei Linde takes you into the Mul­ti­verse; and Cal­tech’s Maria Spirop­u­lu probes Nature’s Con­stituents, to name a few Mas­ter Class­es. Mean­while Bri­an Greene cur­rent­ly teach­es two of the uni­ver­si­ty cours­es: “Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty: A Math-Based Intro­duc­tion” and (high­light­ed above) “Space, Time and Ein­stein: A Con­cep­tu­al Tour of Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty.”

All of the cours­es are absolute­ly free but the videos are only avail­able if you reg­is­ter with World Sci­ence U.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Bri­an Greene Breaks Down Einstein’s The­o­ry of Grav­i­ta­tion­al Waves for Stephen Col­bert

The Ori­gins Project Brings Togeth­er Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Fla­tow, and More on One Stage

Michio Kaku & Bri­an Green Explain String The­o­ry in a Nut­shell: Ele­gant Expla­na­tions of an Ele­gant The­o­ry

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.