Popular Science writer Josh Dean finds out what happens when you try to get an MIT education using the legal five-finger discount. Dean “took” a class taught by MIT physics professor Walter Lewin, who, incidentally, has developed a following via OpenCourseWare. In the video above, Lewin swings from a wire to demonstrate a pendulum. Dean learns, if nothing else, free isn’t the same as easy:
I stuck with it, for a while. In a week, I watched three of Lewin’s 50-minute lectures and understood almost none of them. The stunts for which he’s become famous are undeniably entertaining — I think it’s fair to call this prop-wielding genius the Gallagher of science — but at the end of each hour I’d look down at my scrawls and realize they were useless to me. They looked like hieroglyphics.
I got that long-dormant lost-in-class feeling that triggers notebook doodles and clock watching, and I started to dread “going.” And so, in a departure lounge at Miami International Airport, around the time Lewin said, “We now come to a much more difficult part, and that is multiplication of vectors,” I decided to drop the class.
The school puts its materials on its OpenCourseware site and collects its video lectures on its YouTube channel.
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