Season
Season 1 Episode
- Season 1 Introduction
- Season 1 The Law of Falling Bodies
- Season 1 Derivatives
- Season 1 Inertia
- Season 1 Vectors
- Season 1 Newton's Laws
- Season 1 Integration
- Season 1 The Apple and the Moon
- Season 1 Moving in Circles
- Season 1 Fundamental Forces
- Season 1 Gravity, Electricity, Magnetism
- Season 1 The Millikan Experiment
- Season 1 Conservation of Energy
- Season 1 Potential Energy
- Season 1 Conservation of Momentum
- Season 1 Harmonic Motion
- Season 1 Resonance
- Season 1 Waves
- Season 1 Angular Momentum
- Season 1 Torques and Gyroscopes
- Season 1 Kepler's Three Laws
- Season 1 The Kepler Problem
- Season 1 Energy and Eccentricity
- Season 1 Navigating in Space
- Season 1 Kepler to Einstein
- Season 1 Harmony of the Spheres
- Season 1 Beyond the Mechanical Universe
- Season 1 Static Electricity
- Season 1 The Electric Field
- Season 1 Potential and Capacitance
- Season 1 Voltage, Energy, and Force
- Season 1 The Electric Battery
- Season 1 Electric Circuits
- Season 1 Magnetism
- Season 1 The Magnetic Field
- Season 1 Vector Fields and Hydrodynamics
- Season 1 Electromagnetic Induction
- Season 1 Alternating Current
- Season 1 Maxwell's Equations
- Season 1 Optics
- Season 1 The Michelson-Morley Experiment
- Season 1 The Lorentz Transformation
- Season 1 Velocity and Time
- Season 1 Mass, Momentum, Energy
- Season 1 Temperature and Gas Laws
- Season 1 Engine of Nature
- Season 1 Entropy
- Season 1 Low Temperatures
- Season 1 The Atom
- Season 1 Particles and Waves
- Season 1 From Atoms to Quarks
- Season 1 The Quantum Mechanical Universe
The Mechanical Universe - Season 1
8.17 48 minutes The Mechanical Universe... And Beyond, is a 52-part telecourse filmed at the California Institute of Technology, and produced by Caltech and INTELECOM Intelligent Telecommunications. The series introduces university level physics, covering topics from Copernicus to quantum mechanics.
Produced starting in 1985, the videos make heavy use of historical dramatizations and visual aids to explain physics concepts. The latter were state of the art at the time, incorporating almost 8 hours of computer animation created by computer graphics pioneer Jim Blinn. Each episode opens and closes with a "phantom" lecture by Caltech professor David Goodstein. After more than a quarter century, the series is still often used as a supplemental teaching aid, for its clear explanation of fundamental concepts such as special relativity.
The Mechanical Universe lectures are actual freshman physics lectures from Physics 1a and 1b courses at the California Institute of Technology. The room seen in the videos is the Bridge lecture hall.
The series can be purchased, or viewed by streaming from the Annenberg website, or can be viewed on other video streaming sites such as YouTube and Google Video.
