Measurements of Space and Time
By Walter Lewin - MIT
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Lecture Description
In this introductory lecture, Professor Lewin discuses basic units, dimensions, measurements and associated uncertainties, dimensional analysis, and scaling arguments. Further, he explains why a measurement is meaningless without knowledge of its uncertainty, using data collected by Galileo Galilei as an example. He begins to dive into dimensional analysis, reasoning that the time from an object to fall from a certain height is independent of its mass and proportional to the square root of the height from which it is dropped. He confirms this conclusion by dropping an apple from various heights.
Course Description
This course is a first-semester freshman physics class in Newtonian Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, and Kinetic Gas Theory. In addition to the basic concepts a variety of interesting topics are covered in this course: Binary Stars, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Resonance Phenomena, Musical Instruments, Stellar Collapse, Supernovae, Astronomical observations from very high flying balloons (lecture 35), and you will be allowed a peek into the intriguing Quantum World.
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