The Mechanical Universe (52 episodes)

[ICON]

The individual video links are with each description below. The entire series is likely the most comprehensive science documentary series you'll find on the internet.
There are 52 videos, each being 30min long. Enjoy!


The Mechanical Universe
This series helps teachers demystify physics by showing students what it looks like. Field trips to hot-air balloon events, symphony concerts, bicycle shops, and other locales make complex concepts more accessible. Inventive computer graphics illustrate abstract concepts such as time, force, and capacitance, while historical reenactments of the studies of Newton, Leibniz, Maxwell, and others trace the evolution of theories. The Mechanical Universe helps meet different students' needs, from the basic requirements of liberal arts students to the rigorous demands of science and engineering majors. This series is also valuable for teacher professional development.

Produced by the California Institute of Technology and Intelecom. 1985.

Lesson 1: Introduction to The Mechanical Universe
Provocative questions begin the quest of The Mechanical Universe. This introductory preview enters an Aristotelian world in conflict, introduces the revolutionary ideas and heroes from Copernicus through Newton, and, like a space shuttle from past to present, links the physics of the heavens to the physics of the Earth.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...39130229106025

Lesson 2: The Law of Falling Bodies
With the conventional wisdom of the Aristotelian world view, almost everyone could see that heavy bodies fell faster than lighter ones. Then along cam Galileo. His genius deduced that the distance a body has fallen at any instant is proportional to the square of the time spent falling. From that, speed and acceleration follow with the help of a mathematical tool called a derivative.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...17188010584794

Lesson 3: Derivatives
The function of mathematics in physical science. From a theoretical concept to a practical tool, the derivative helps to determine the instantaneous speed and acceleration of a falling body. Differentiation is developed further to calculate how any quantity changes in relation to another. The power rule, the product rule, the chain rule -- with a few simple rules, differentiating any function becomes a simple mechanical task.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...49264514656651

Lesson 4: Inertia
The rise of Galileo and his fall from grace. Copernicus conjectured that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits around the sun. Considering its implications, a rather dangerous assumption that prompted rather risky questions: Why do objects fall to Earth rather than hurtle off into space? And in this heretical scheme of things in which the Earth wasn't at the center, where was God? Risking more than his favored status in Rome, Galileo helped to answer such questions with the law of inertia.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...99686846698725

Lesson 5: Vectors
Physics must explain not only why and how much, but also where and which way. Physicists and mathematicians invented a way of describing quantities that have direction as well as magnitude. Laws that deal with such phenomena as distance and speed are universal. And vectors, which describe quantities such as displacement and velocity, universally express the law of physics in a way that is the same for all coordinate systems.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...17973509844622

Lesson 6: Newton's Laws
For all the phenomena of The Mechanical Universe, Isaac Newton laid down the laws. A refinement on Galileo's law of inertia, Newton's first law states that every body remains at rest or continues in uniform motion unless an unbalanced force acts on it. His second law, the most profound statement in classical mechanics, relates the causes to the changes of motion in every object in the cosmos. Newton's third law explains the phenomenon of interactions: for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...85615223230317

Lesson 7: Integration
Newton and Leibniz sprint for the calculus. Winning the longest race in scientific history -- more than 2000 years, from the Golden Age of Greece to the end of the seventeenth century in Europe -- Newton and Leibniz arrived at the conclusion that differentiation and integration are inverse processes. Their exciting intellectual discovery, dramatically rerun to reflect the times, ended in an extremely controversial dead heat.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...13217416289653

Lesson 8: The Apple and the Moon
The first authentic steps toward outer space. Seeking an explanation for Kepler's laws, Newton discovered that gravity described the force between any two particles in the universe. From an English orchard to Cape Canaveral and beyond, Newton's universal law of gravity reveals why an apple but not the moon falls to the Earth.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...90422523131277

Lesson 9: Moving in Circles
The original Platonic ideal, with derivatives of vector functions. According to Plato, stars are heavenly beings that orbit the Earth with uniform perfection -- uniform speed and perfect circles. Even in this imperfect world, uniform circular motion make perfect mathematical sense.
missing, but coming soon.

Lesson 10: The Fundamental Forces
All physical phenomena of nature are explained by four forces. Two nuclear forces -- strong and weak -- dwell within the atomic nucleus. The fundamental force of gravity granges across the universe at large. So does electricity, the fourth fundamental force, which binds the atoms of all matter.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...32513511665648

Lesson 11: Gravity, Electricity, Magnetism
Forces at play in the Physics Theater. The gravitational force between two masses, the electric force between two charges, and the magnetic force between two magnetic poles -- all these forces take essentially the same mathematical form. Newton's script suggested connections between electricity and magnetism. Acting on scientific hunches, Maxwell saw the matter in an entirely new light.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...29389067399839

Lesson 12: The Millikan Experiment
How does science progress? Through painstaking trial and error, illustrated with a dramatic re-creation of Robert Millikan's classic oil-drop experiment. Understanding the electric force on a charged droplet and viscosity, the measured the charge of a single electron.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...52432147926032

Lesson 13: Conservation of Energy
The myth of the energy crisis. According to one of the major laws of physics, energy is neither created nor destroyed.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...03621222966483

Lesson 14: Potential Energy
The nature of stability. Potential energy provides a clue, and a powerful model, for understanding why the world has worked the same way since the beginning of time.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...18123967019671

Lesson 15: Conservation of Momentum
If The Mechanical Universe is a perpetual clock, what keeps it ticking away till the end of time? Taking a cue from Descartes, momentum -- the product of mass and velocity -- is always conserved. Newton's laws embody the concept of conservation and momentum. This law provides a powerful principle for analyzing collisions, even at the local pool hall.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...78801687874664

[ICON]

Lesson 16: Harmonic Motion
The music and mathematics of nature. The restoring force and inertia of any stable mechanical system cause objects to execute simple harmonic motion, a phenomenon that repeats itself in perfect time.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...73567228874406

Lesson 17: Resonance
The music and mathematics of nature, Part II. As Galileo noted, the swings of a pendulum increasingly grow with repeated, timed applications of a small force. When the frequency of an applied force matches the natural frequency of a system, large-amplitude oscillations result in the phenomenon of resonance. Resonance explains why a swaying bridge collapsed in a mild wind, and how a wineglass can be shattered by a human voice.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...78368247493737

Lesson 18: Waves
The medium disturbances of nature. With an analysis of simple harmonic motion and a stroke of genius, Newton extended mechanics to the propagation of sound.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...01048206406145

Lesson 19: Angular Momentum
An old momentum with a new twist. Kepler's second law of planetary motion, which is rooted here in a much deeper principle, imagined a line from the sun to a planet that sweeps out equal areas in equal times. Angular momentum is a twist on momentum -- the cross product of the radius vector and momentum. A force with twist is torque. When no torque acts on a system, the angular momentum of the system is conserved.Lesson 19: Angular Momentum
An old momentum with a new twist. Kepler's second law of planetary motion, which is rooted here in a much deeper principle, imagined a line from the sun to a planet that sweeps out equal areas in equal times. Angular momentum is a twist on momentum -- the cross product of the radius vector and momentum. A force with twist is torque. When no torque acts on a system, the angular momentum of the system is conserved.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...90712474026108




Lesson 20: Torques and Gyroscopes
Why a spinning top doesn't topple. When a torque acts on a spinning object, the angular momentum changes, but the object only precesses. The object may be a child's toy, or a part of a navigation system, or Earth itself.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...10371139275474

Lesson 21: Kepler's Three Laws
The wandering mathematician. Kepler's three laws described the motion of heavenly bodies with unprecedented accuracy. However, the planets still moved in paths traced by the ancient Greek mathematicians -- the conic section called an ellipse.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...74873092336626

Lesson 22: The Kepler Problem
The combination of Newton's law of gravity and F = ma. The task of deducing all three of Kepler's laws from Newton's universal law of gravitation is known as the Kepler problem. Its solution is one of the crowning achievements of Western thought.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...26436325469132

Lesson 23: Energy and Eccentricity
The precise orbit of any heavenly body -- a planet, asteroid, or comet -- is fixed by the laws of conservation of energy and angular momentum. The eccentricity, which determines the shape of an orbit, is intimately linked to the energy and angular momentum of the heavenly body.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...75257213364671

Lesson 24: Navigating in Space
Getting from here to there. Voyages to other planets require enormous expenditures of energy. However, the amount of energy expended can be minimized by using the same principles that guide planets around the solar system.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...21806234903981

Lesson 25: From Kepler to Einstein
The orbiting planets, the ebbing and flowing of tides, the falling body as it accelerates -- these phenomena are consequences of the law of gravity. Why that's so leads to Einstein's general theory of relativity, and into the black hole, but not back out again.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...32573390409362

Lesson 26: Harmony of the Spheres
The music of the spheres.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...49670827777526

Lesson 27: Beyond The Mechanical Universe
Provocative questions begin the quest of Beyond The Mechanical Universe. This introductory preview enters the world of Electricity and Magnetism, goes on to 20th-century discoveries of Relativity and Quantum mechanics. The brilliant ideas of Faraday, Ampere, Maxwell, Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg add to The Mechanical Universe of Newton.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...19005036674334

Lesson 28: Static Electricity
To understand materials, one must first understand electricity, and to understand electricity, one must first understand materials. Eighteenth century electricians understood neither, but they knew what it took to spark the interest of an audience and put on an electrifying show. Coulomb's law and the principles of static electricity.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...99933249379692

Lesson 29: The Electric Field
Michael Faraday's vision of lines of constant force in space laid the foundation for the modern idea of the field of force. Electric fields of static charges; Gauss' law and the conservation of flux.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...99252618809989

Lesson 30: Potential and Capacitance
Benjamin Franklin, the great 18th-century American scientist, who later dabbled in politics, was the first to propose a successful theory of the Leyden Jar. He gave positive and negative charges their names, and invented the parallel plate capacitor. Electrical potential, the potential of charged conductors, equipotentials and capacitance.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...67939413915373

[ICON]

Lesson 31: Voltage, Energy and Force
In a world of electric charges and currents, field, forces and voltages, what really matters? When is electricity dangerous or benign, spectacular or useful? The electric potential and its gradient; the potentials of atoms and metals; electric energy, and why sparks jump.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...67491465083999

Lesson 32: The Electric Battery
Electricity changed from a curiosity to a central concern of science and technology in 1800, when Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery. Batteries make use of the internal properties of different metals to turn chemical energy directly into electric energy.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...89618585954670

Lesson 33: Electric Circuits
Design and analysis of currents flowing in series and parallel circuits of resistors and capacitors depend not only on the celebrated laws of Ohm and Kirchhoff, but also on the less celebrated work of Charles Wheatstone.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...13369484807310

Lesson 34: Magnets
William Gilbert, personal physician by appointment to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of England, discovered that the earth behaves like a giant magnet. Magnetism as a natural phenomenon, the behavior of magnetic materials, and the motion of charged particles in a magnetic field.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...87806060668642

Lesson 35: Magnetic Fields
All magnetic fields can be thought to be produced by electric currents. The relationship between a current and the magnetic field it produces is a little peculiar geometrically, and takes some getting used to. The law of Biot and Sarvart, the force between electric currents, and Ampere's law.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...47206167077169

Lesson 36: Vector Fields and Hydrodynamics
At first glance, replacing the old idea of action at a distance by the new idea of the field of force seems to e an exercise in semantics. But it isn't, because fields have definite properties of their own suitable for scientific study. For example, electric fields are different in form from magnetic fields, and both kinds can better be understood by analogy to field of fluid flow.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...91853101190178

Lesson 37: Electromagnetic Induction
After Oersted's 1820 discovery that electric currents create magnetism, it was obvious that in some way magnetism should be able to create electric currents. The discovery of electromagnetic induction, in 1831, by Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry was one of the most important of the 19th century, not only scientifically, but also technologically, because it is the means by which nearly all electric power is generated today.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...92405005627535

Lesson 38: Alternating Current
Electromagnetic induction makes it easy and natural to generate alternating current. Use of transformers makes it practical to distribute ac over long distances. Although Nikola Tesla understood all this, Thomas Edison chose not to, and thereby hangs a tale. Alternating current circuits obey a differential equation identical to the harmonic oscillator resonance equation.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...98063850114481

Lesson 39: Maxwell's Equations
By the 1860s all the pieces of the electricity and magnetism puzzle were in place, except one. The last piece, discovered by James Clerk Maxwell and called (unfortunately) the displacement current was just what was needed to produce electromagnetic waves called (among other things) light.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...22471449734099

Lesson 40: Optics
Maxwell's theory says that electromagnetic waves of all wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma-rays and including visible light, are all basically the same phenomenon. Many of the properties of light are really just properties of waves, including reflection, refraction and diffraction. Ordinary light can be used to see things on a human scale, X-rays to "see" things on an atomic scale.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...56350677175806

Lesson 41: The Michelson-Morley Experiment
In 1887, in Cleveland, Ohio, an exquisitely designed measurement of the motion of the earth through the aether resulted in the most brilliant failure in scientific history.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...68418923601369

Lesson 42: The Lorentz Transformation
If the speed of light is to be the same for all inertial observers (as indicated by the Michelson-Morley experiment) the equations for time and space are not difficult to find. But what do they mean? They mean that the length of a meter stick, or the rate of ticking of a clock depends on who measure it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...14962912264988

Lesson 43: Velocity and Time
Unlike Lorentz, Albert Einstein was motivated to perfect the central ideas of physics rather than to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment. The result was a wholly new understanding of the meaning of space and time, including such matters as the transformation of velocities, time dilation, and the twin paradox.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...98041250713145

Lesson 44: Mass, Momentum, Energy
The new meaning of space and time make it necessary to formulate a new mechanics. Starting from the conservation of momentum, it turns out among other things that E = mc 2.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...02821869460358

Lesson 45: The Temperature and Gas Law
The ups and downs of scientific research are reflected in Boyle's experiments, and Charles' investigations. Hot new discoveries about the behaviors of gases make the connection between temperature and heat, and raise the possibility of an absolute scale.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...35002599580195

[ICON]

Lesson 46: Engine of Nature
There was a young man named Carnot
Whose logic was able to show
For a work source proficient
There's none so efficient
As an engine that simply won't go.

- David L. Goodstein, Physics undergraduate (1958)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...96629565717676


Lesson 47: Entropy
This program illustrates the genius of Carnot, Part II, and the second law of thermodynamics. The efficiency of Carnot's ideal engine depends on the ratio between high and low temperatures in the running cycle. Carnot's theory begins with simple steam engines and ends with profound implications for the behavior of matter and the flow of time throughout the universe.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...46068654707156

Lesson 48: Low Temperatures
Solids, liquids, and gases are the substance of every substance in the physical world. With the quest for low temperatures came the discovery that, under the right conditions of temperature and pressure, all elements can exist in each of the basic states of matter.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...73784636686887

Lesson 49: The Atom
This program explores the history of the atom, from the ancient Greeks to the early 20th century, when discoveries by J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford created a new crisis for the world of physics.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...32025674198539

Lesson 50: Particles and Waves
Even before the crisis of the atom, there was evidence that light, which was certainly a wave, could sometimes act like a particle. In the new physics, called quantum mechanics, not only does light come in quanta called photons, but electrons and other particles also interfere like waves.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...99801799851614

Lesson 51: From Atoms to Quarks
Electron waves confined by electric attraction to the nucleus help resolve the dilemma of the atom and account for the periodic table of the elements. Nucleons themselves obey a kind of period table, following inner rules that lead to the idea of quarks.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...78204233447101

Lesson 52: The Quantum Mechanical Universe
A last, lingering look at where we've been, and perhaps a timid glance into the future, marks the close of the series The Mechanical Universe and Beyond....
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...90417020571059

[ICON]

Once i get the link for #9 i'll post it.

[Doggcow]

what is the point of this here?

[ICON]

The series would be absurd to watch at once...not to mentions boring. But, some of the episodes are diamonds for someone taking a physics class. i hope they help others as much as they've helped me.

Not as cool as Call Of Duty 4 i know.