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June 21, 2007, 01:33 PM ET
Physics for Future Presidents
Richard A. Muller tries to blow up a truck with a meteor in his first lecture. Well, he shows a video of the impact, which is actually a Toyota truck commercial, and the vehicle survives a huge fireball. "The car is meteor-proof," he laughs.
It's all part of Physics C10 at the University of California at Berkeley, which Muller--a noted physicist--calls "Physics for Future Presidents." The course has been videotaped and is now online for all future holders of public office to peruse. The lecture is on iTunes but seems hard to find, and it's easily grabbed from Google Video if you search for "physics 10 Berkeley."
"My goal," Muller says on his web page, "is to cover the physics that future world leaders need to know (and maybe present world leaders too)."
In the course video, after watching the explosion, he pulls a baseball-size rock from his pocket, untangling it from his iPod, and asks how an object so small can create an blast that's so big? The answer: Its rapid path through the air created a lot of kinetic energy. "And what's kinetic energy," he asks? It's the release of stored force from an object in motion, he explains, like the energy from a spring when you stretch it and it snaps back. --Josh Fischman
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