Face to Face with Bertrand Russell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish’

in Philosophy, Television | August 31st, 2012

In April of 1959 the British philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian Bertrand Rus­sell sat down with John Free­man of the BBC pro­gram Face to Face for a brief but wide-rang­ing and can­did inter­view. Rus­sell rem­i­nisced about his ear­ly attrac­tion to math­e­mat­ics. “I got the sort of sat­is­fac­tion that Pla­to says you can get out of math­e­mat­ics,” he said. “It was an eter­nal world. It was a time­less world. It was a world where there was a pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cer­tain kind of per­fec­tion.”

Rus­sell, of course, dis­tin­guished him­self in that rar­i­fied world as one of the founders of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy and a co-author of Prin­cip­ia Math­e­mat­i­ca, a land­mark work that sought to derive all of math­e­mat­ics from a set of log­i­cal axioms. Although the Prin­cip­ia fell short of its goal, it made an enor­mous mark on the course of 20th cen­tu­ry thought. When World War I came along, though, Rus­sell felt it was time to come down from the ivory tow­er of abstract think­ing. “This world is too bad,” Rus­sell told Free­man. “We must notice it.”

The half-hour con­ver­sa­tion, shown above in its entire­ty, is of a qual­i­ty rarely seen on tele­vi­sion today. The inter­view­er Free­man was at that time a for­mer Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment and a future Ambas­sador to the Unit­ed States. Rus­sell talks with him about his child­hood, his views on reli­gion, his polit­i­cal and social activism, even his amus­ing con­vic­tion that smok­ing extend­ed his life. But per­haps the most famous moment comes at the end, when Free­man asks the old philoso­pher what mes­sage he would offer to peo­ple liv­ing a thou­sand years hence. In answer­ing the ques­tion, Rus­sell bal­ances the two great spheres that occu­pied his life:

I should like to say two things, one intel­lec­tu­al and one moral:

The intel­lec­tu­al thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are study­ing any mat­ter or con­sid­er­ing any phi­los­o­phy, ask your­self only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Nev­er let your­self be divert­ed either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have benef­i­cent social effects if it were believed, but look only and sole­ly at what are the facts. That is the intel­lec­tu­al thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very sim­ple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is fool­ish. In this world, which is get­ting more and more close­ly inter­con­nect­ed, we have to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some peo­ple say things that we don’t like. We can only live togeth­er in that way, and if we are to live togeth­er and not die togeth­er we must learn a kind of char­i­ty and a kind of tol­er­ance which is absolute­ly vital to the con­tin­u­a­tion of human life on this plan­et.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell on the Exis­tence of God and the After­life

Three Pas­sions of Bertrand Rus­sell (and a Col­lec­tion of Free Texts)

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’

When Asteroids Attack! Neil deGrasse Tyson and NASA Explain How To Stop an Armageddon

in Astronomy | August 24th, 2012

If pop cul­ture has taught us non-sci­en­tists any­thing about aster­oids, it’s that we should blow them up. From clas­sic video game Aster­oids to the Michael Bay dis­as­ter clas­sic Armaged­don, aster­oids are either ran­dom bits of float­ing debris out to destroy us, or mas­sive malig­nant space tumors hurtling our way to destroy us, which we’re told is how the dinosaurs died out. But, says super­star physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson—in Vice’s short video (above) “Blow­ing Up Aster­oids with NASA and Neil deGrasse Tyson”—“We’re clever enough that we nev­er have to go extinct by an aster­oid. We have more choic­es avail­able to us than Tyran­nosaurus Rex did.” Choic­es like turn­ing an aster­oid into space dust? Prob­a­bly not. Turns out, Armaged­don wasn’t entire­ly sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly accu­rate. In fact, NASA shows Michael Bay’s movie to its trainees to see how many sci­en­tif­ic absur­di­ties they can find. The record, as of 2007, was at 168.

So what to do! Well, it turns out that the chances of an aster­oid col­lid­ing with the earth are slim, but still a bit too close for com­fort. As Tyson explains above, there is, in fact, an aster­oid head­ed our way, called Apophis, in 2029. If Apophis goes through a region called “the key­hole,” it will impact the earth sev­en years lat­er. The prob­a­bil­i­ty of this occur­ring as of 2009 is 1 in 250,000. Yikes. Astro­naut Mike Gern­hardt, a pri­ma­ry inves­ti­ga­tor at NEEMO (NASA Extreme Envi­ron­ment Mis­sion Oper­a­tions) is on the case. His team uses under­wa­ter sim­u­la­tions in Key Largo, Flori­da to recre­ate an aster­oid-like envi­ron­ment and explore it, col­lect sam­ples, etc. in what NASA calls an “Ana­log Mis­sion.” Just how any of this might pre­vent an aster­oid from destroy­ing the plan­et escapes me, to be hon­est (and the “blow­ing up” part of the video’s title doesn’t ever get an expla­na­tion). But the NEEMO project is still pret­ty cool, as you can wit­ness in an inter­view with NEEMO Mis­sion Man­ag­er Bill Todd below.

The Vice video is part of their Moth­er­board TV series, which informs us on its site that NEEMO, like every­thing cool these days, is like­ly to be defund­ed. Let’s hope they can fig­ure out how save us from aster­oid Armaged­don before the mon­ey runs out.

via The Atlantic

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

Henry Rollins Pitches Education as the Key to Restoring Democracy

in Education, Life, Politics | August 22nd, 2012

Hen­ry Rollins had dropped out of col­lege and was work­ing at a Haa­gen-Dazs in Wash­ing­ton, DC when he joined the sem­i­nal L.A. hard­core punk band Black Flag in 1981, a career move that would shape the rest of the singer/author/actor/activist’s life. And although he left high­er edu­ca­tion for a more indi­vid­u­al­ized path, Rollins has a very high regard for the poten­tial of a good edu­ca­tion to change peo­ple’s lives.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Rollins’ moti­va­tion­al Big Think talk to young peo­ple on the dan­gers of resent­ment. In the short, but equal­ly inspir­ing, talk above–from the same set of inter­views–Rollins describes edu­ca­tion as the engine of a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety, “the great equal­iz­er.” For Rollins, edu­ca­tion is the key to a “more vig­or­ous democ­ra­cy.” And although he makes some arguable claims about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of edu­ca­tion­al reform to sub­stan­tial­ly dimin­ish the effects of insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism and pover­ty, his view of what an edu­ca­tion should be cor­re­sponds to what edu­ca­tion­al reform­ers have stressed for decades—that mov­ing to a focus on crit­i­cal think­ing, rather than “teach­ing to the test,” is a shift that needs to hap­pen in order for stu­dents to become curi­ous, inten­tion­al, and inde­pen­dent learn­ers and, ulti­mate­ly, free and inde­pen­dent cit­i­zens.

Rollins spec­u­lates that cer­tain polit­i­cal actors and vest­ed inter­ests delib­er­ate­ly block edu­ca­tion­al reform to main­tain the sta­tus quo. Whether or not you accept his analy­sis, there’s no deny­ing that the state of pri­ma­ry, sec­ondary, and high­er edu­ca­tion in the U.S. is dire, and the func­tion­al effi­ca­cy of our demo­c­ra­t­ic process seems con­stant­ly in jeop­ardy. Allud­ing to the dic­tum attrib­uted to Thomas Jef­fer­son (who may not have actu­al­ly writ­ten this) that “An edu­cat­ed cit­i­zen­ry is a vital req­ui­site for our sur­vival as a free peo­ple,” Rollins believes that edu­ca­tion­al reforms offer “the way out” of our cur­rent polit­i­cal grid­lock and of the despair­ing sit­u­a­tions under­priv­i­leged peo­ple are born into. I think he makes a pret­ty com­pelling case in just under four min­utes.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

“Glitch” Artists Compose with Software Crashes and Corrupted Files

in Music, Technology | August 16th, 2012

A the­o­ry: one of the dri­vers of our cur­rent wave of nostalgia—lo-fi ana­log hiss and pop in music and ready­made vin­tage fil­ters in dig­i­tal photography—is the loss of imper­fec­tion. Increas­ing­ly pow­er­ful tech­nolo­gies ren­der sound and vision too slick­ly pris­tine, glossy, hyper­re­al, and thus imper­son­al and alien. The lat­est episode of PBS Arts’ “Off Book” series (above) fea­tures a trend toward dis­rupt­ing dig­i­tal over­pro­duc­tion by delib­er­ate­ly exploit­ing the weak­ness­es in new tech­nolo­gies. Glitch artists makes use of “nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring” (so to speak) cor­rup­tions of soft­ware, or cre­ate their own cor­rup­tions in a process called “data­bend­ing”—open­ing images as text files, for exam­ple, and adding and/or delet­ing infor­ma­tion from the image.

Unlike punk rock, to which glitch is com­pared by one of the artists above, some glitch art requires a fair­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies. For exam­ple, video artist Anton Mari­ni describes how he writes his own soft­ware to pro­duce glitch effects. But since vir­tu­al­ly any­one can access a pc and stan­dard text and image-edit­ing soft­ware, it remains a fair­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic aes­thet­ic, sim­i­lar to the bed­room tech­nolo­gies that enable almost any­one to pro­duce and dis­trib­ute their own musi­cal com­po­si­tions. There are sites offer­ing tuto­ri­als on how to cre­ate your own glitch art and even a Flickr account called Glitch­bot that will auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate glitch images for you, like Hip­sta­mat­ic or Insta­gram will con­vert your care­less snap­shots into intrigu­ing vin­tage arti­facts. Sound too easy? Maybe, but so was Duchamp’s uri­nal. Con­text, as always, mat­ters, and whether glitch art is “art” may ulti­mate­ly become a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion. At the moment, glitch images, video and music offer a way to human­ize all-too-inhu­man cor­po­rate prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

in Literature, Television | August 15th, 2012

“But it’s f****d, because the man got to where he need­ed to be, and she was­n’t even worth it. Daisy was­n’t noth­in’ past any oth­er b***h any­where, you know? He did all that for her, and in the end, it ain’t amount to s**t.” So begins a scene of book-club dis­cus­sion of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s nov­el The Great Gats­by (find in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) in David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series The Wire. Being a dra­ma focused on crime, pun­ish­ment, and the dys­func­tion in soci­ety’s han­dling of both, The Wire sets this lit­er­ary analy­sis with­in prison walls. Being the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the 2000s, it per­haps seemed nat­ur­al to ref­er­ence the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the twen­ties — or, quite pos­si­bly, out of any decade. The fit turns out to be even clos­er than it seems: while Fitzger­ald has received acco­lades for his indict­ment of Amer­i­ca — specif­i­cal­ly, of the amor­phous promise, or the promise of amor­phous­ness, that is the “Amer­i­can Dream” — Simon and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have received acco­lades for theirs — specif­i­cal­ly, of the nature of near­ly every Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing.

The book club’s leader asks what Fitzger­ald meant when he said there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives. “He’s say­ing that the past is always with us,” replies D’An­ge­lo Barks­dale, a mid­dle man­ag­er in a drug-deal­ing empire and a char­ac­ter often sin­gled out for crit­i­cal praise. “Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that s**t mat­ters. [ … ] Like, at the end of the book? Boats and tides and all? It’s like, you can change up. You can say you some­body new. You can give your­self a whole new sto­ry. But what came first is who you real­ly are, and what hap­pened before is what real­ly hap­pened. It does­n’t mat­ter that some fool say you dif­fer­ent, ’cause the only thing that make you dif­fer­ent is what you real­ly do, or what you real­ly go through. Like all them books in his library. Now, he fron­tin’ with all them books. But if we pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read one of ’em. Gats­by, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and ’cause he was­n’t ready to get real with the sto­ry, that s**t caught up to him.” H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er - A Yale course in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online 

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

A Room With A View: Camera Obscura Captures Beauty of Venice, Inside and Out

in Photography | August 6th, 2012

When we hear the word “cam­era” we tend to think of a lit­tle device that fits in the hand. Actu­al­ly, the word is Latin for “vault­ed cham­ber,” or room. The first cam­eras were rooms.

Long before the inven­tion of pho­to­graph­ic film, it was dis­cov­ered that if you have a dark­ened room with a small hole in it, the light pass­ing through will project an upside-down image of the sur­round­ing scenery onto the oppo­site wall. The Chi­nese philoso­pher Mo Tzu, who died in the ear­ly 4th cen­tu­ry BCE, called it the “locked trea­sure room.” In 1604 the Ger­man math­e­mati­cian and astronomer Johannes Kepler coined the term “cam­era obscu­ra,” or dark­ened room.

Kepler and oth­er astronomers used the cam­era obscu­ra to observe the sun. The prob­lem with view­ing dim­mer objects, though, is that the tiny aper­ture lets in very lit­tle light. You can widen the hole to let in more light, but as you do so the image gets blur­ri­er. Even­tu­al­ly it was dis­cov­ered that you can have a wide aper­ture if you place a glass lens over it to focus the light.

With advances in optics, artists made more use of the device. The painter David Hock­ney and physi­cist Charles M. Fal­co have the­o­rized that as ear­ly as the 15th cen­tu­ry, Renais­sance painters were using the cam­era obscu­ra and oth­er opti­cal devices to project images onto their can­vas­es as an aid to com­po­si­tion. By the time the chem­i­cal process of pho­tog­ra­phy was invent­ed in the 1820s, the cam­era was old hat.

In the scene above from the 2007 BBC series The Genius of Pho­tog­ra­phy, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Abelar­do Morell returns to the cam­er­a’s roots to cre­ate a strik­ing image of the Basil­i­ca di San­ta Maria del­la Salute in Venice pro­ject­ed onto an inte­ri­or wall of a palaz­zo on the oth­er side of the Grand Canal. To cap­ture the strange inte­ri­or-exte­ri­or scene on film, he uses a cam­era-with­in-a-cam­era.

Morell has been com­bin­ing mod­ern pho­tog­ra­phy with the ancient cam­era obscu­ra tech­nique for over 20 years. He first tried it in the liv­ing room of his home in Quin­cy, Mass­a­chu­setts. He sealed off all the win­dows, cut a dime-sized hole in the cov­er­ing and set up a view cam­era. His first expo­sures last­ed five to 10 hours. Since then, Mor­rell has trav­eled the globe to cap­ture exot­ic exte­ri­ors pro­ject­ed onto inte­ri­or walls. He now uses high-speed dig­i­tal cam­eras to cut the expo­sure time down to min­utes. “One of the sat­is­fac­tions I get from mak­ing this imagery,” he says on his Web site, “comes from my see­ing the weird and yet nat­ur­al mar­riage of the inside and the out­side.”

You can view a selec­tion of Morel­l’s cam­era obscu­ra pho­tographs at AbelardoMorell.net. And if you’d like to try it your­self, watch the video below from Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, “Mak­ing Your Own Room With a View.”

Take the ‘Happiness Experiment’

in Philosophy, Psychology | August 1st, 2012

Hap­pi­ness is a state of mind. We all know that. But when it comes to decid­ing whether anoth­er per­son is tru­ly hap­py, our per­cep­tions are col­ored by our own states of mind–in par­tic­u­lar, by our  val­ue judg­ments. A per­son can have all the men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of a hap­py per­son, but if he or she is liv­ing what we con­sid­er a “bad life,” we are far less like­ly to judge that they are hap­py. Sur­pris­ing­ly, the same moral eval­u­a­tions do not seem to enter into our con­cept of unhap­pi­ness.

These are the find­ings of a trio of researchers at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty: Jonathan Phillips, Luke Mis­en­heimer and Joshua Knobe. You can read about the study in their paper, “The Ordi­nary Con­cept of Hap­pi­ness (And Oth­ers Like It),” pub­lished in the July, 2011 Emo­tion Review. The study is part of a new move­ment called Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy (or “x‑phi”), which goes beyond the philoso­pher’s tra­di­tion­al method of test­ing intuitions–a pri­ori con­cep­tu­al analysis–to use of the tools of cog­ni­tive sci­ence. You can learn more at the Yale Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy Web site, and take the enter­tain­ing video test above to get a taste of some of the coun­ter­in­tu­itive find­ings of x‑phi.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Yale’s Open Cours­es Inspire a New Series of Old-Fash­ioned Books

Psy­chol­o­gy: Free Cours­es

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) Feuds with Norman Mailer & William F. Buckley

in Books, Literature | July 31st, 2012

Gore Vidal wrote 25 nov­els and var­i­ous mem­oirs, essays, plays, tele­vi­sion dra­mas and screen­plays. He invest­ed him­self in Amer­i­can pol­i­tics and ran for office twice, los­ing both times. He tend­ed open­ly toward homo­sex­u­al­i­ty long before the coun­try warmed up to the idea. And he nev­er backed down from a good argu­ment. Gore Vidal died Tues­day from com­pli­ca­tions of pneu­mo­nia at his home in Los Ange­les.

Dur­ing the 1960s and 70s, Vidal feud­ed pub­licly with lit­er­ary and polit­i­cal foes alike. Some­times it made for good TV. Oth­er times it made for bad TV. It did­n’t real­ly mat­ter. He was ready to go. Above, we have Gore Vidal’s ver­bal brawl with the mer­cu­r­ial (and seem­ing­ly sauced) nov­el­ist Nor­man Mail­er. It hap­pened on The Dick Cavett Show in Decem­ber, 1971, and only the show’s host (and the bewil­dered Janet Flan­ner) emerge from the dust­up look­ing okay. Slate has more on this mem­o­rable episode here.

The next clip brings us back to an ABC tele­vi­sion pro­gram aired dur­ing the 1968 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Con­ven­tion in Chica­go. Suf­fice it to say, emo­tions were run­ning high. In the months lead­ing up to the Con­ven­tion, Mar­tin Luther King Jr. and RFK were both assas­si­nat­ed. Riots fol­lowed. Mean­while, the Viet­nam War splin­tered the nation in two. The Chica­go police tried to shut down demon­stra­tions by anti-war pro­tes­tors, and even­tu­al­ly the two sides clashed in the parks and streets. Amidst all of this, Buck­ley and Vidal, both polit­i­cal ana­lysts for ABC News, start­ed dis­cussing the pro­tes­tors and their rights to free speech, when things came to a head. Vidal called Buck­ley a “pro-cryp­to-Nazi.” Buck­ley called Vidal a “queer” and threat­ened to “sock [him] in the god­damn face.” The threat was not eas­i­ly for­got­ten. It became the fod­der for jokes when Buck­ley inter­viewed Noam Chom­sky the next year.

The Strawberry Fields Forever Demos: The Making of a Beatles Classic (1966)

in Music | July 30th, 2012

In 1966, John Lennon found him­self in Almería, Spain work­ing on Richard Lester’s film, How I Won the War. Between shots, he began writ­ing Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er, a song Lennon lat­er called “psy­cho­analy­sis set to music” and “one of the few true songs I ever wrote.” Although the song became one of the Bea­t­les’ most refined and intri­cate record­ings, it start­ed off sim­ply, with Lennon try­ing out lyrics and chords on his acoustic gui­tar, then record­ing solo demos upon his return to Eng­land. Lis­ten above.

Once the Bea­t­les start­ed record­ing the song in Novem­ber, 1966, the band spent at least 45 hours, spaced over a month, work­ing through new ver­sions. Around and around they went, tweak­ing, pol­ish­ing, record­ing new takes, try­ing to get it right. Even­tu­al­ly the song, as we know it, came togeth­er when George Mar­tin, the Bea­t­les’ pro­duc­er, pulled off the “Big Edit,” a tech­no­log­i­cal feat that involved speed­ing up one record­ing and slow­ing down anoth­er and fus­ing them into the song we know today. (Amaz­ing­ly, the two tracks were record­ed in dif­fer­ent keys and tem­pos.) Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er was released as a dou­ble A‑side sin­gle in Feb­ru­ary 1967 along with Pen­ny Lane, and it was accom­pa­nied by a pro­mo­tion­al film, a pre­cur­sor to music videos we know and love today. You can watch it below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Gui­tar Solo by George Har­ri­son

The Mak­ing of “Tomor­row Nev­er Knows”

Gui­tarist Randy Bach­man Demys­ti­fies the Open­ing Chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

The Bea­t­les’ Rooftop Con­cert: The Last Gig

The Mathematics of Spiderman and the Physics of Superheroes

in Animation, Math, Physics | July 19th, 2012

I have not seen the new Spi­der­man reboot, so I’ll have to reserve judg­ment on the virtues of the movie. But, in gen­er­al, super­hero movies suc­ceed or fail for me based on how plau­si­ble and con­sis­tent the physics of the alter­nate uni­verse they cre­ate are. In the above video from the “Emory [Uni­ver­si­ty] Looks at Hol­ly­wood” series, Skip Garibal­di, pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics (who pre­vi­ous­ly exam­ined the math of rock climb­ing) explains that the new Spi­der­man film does, with a minor excep­tion, por­tray the feats of Spi­der­man in a math­e­mat­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble way—granted that we’re will­ing to believe in super­pow­ers. For exam­ple, Spi­der­man’s grace­ful swings through the city on long strands of web­bing don’t just serve a cin­e­mat­ic pur­pose; they also keep him from pos­si­bly dis­lo­cat­ing his shoul­ders while com­ing to a full-stop from a free-fall.

Ana­lyz­ing the sci­ence of super­heroes is a fun side­line for pop cul­ture-mind­ed sci­en­tists. In some cas­es, it can be an effec­tive teach­ing tool as well. Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta physi­cist and com­ic book fan James Kakalios devotes an entire lec­ture to “The Uncan­ny Physics of Super­hero Com­ic Books.” Kakalios, who has writ­ten a book called the Physics of Super­heroes, worked as a sci­ence con­sul­tant on the Spi­der­man reboot and on Zack Snyder’s adap­ta­tion of Watch­men, which he dis­cuss­es below.

Many great physics cours­es (some intro­duc­to­ry, some advanced) can be found in the Physics sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Online Cours­es.