The following content is provided under a Creative Commons license. Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. To make a donation or view additional materials from hundreds of MIT courses visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. Well, 802 is of course largely about electricity and magnetism. And at the heart of electricity and magnetism are the four, the famous four, equations we call the Maxwell's equations. That's quite a difficult course for students and I go out of my way to also introduce many phenomena that they see around them and make those phenomena connect with electricity and magnetism. For instance lightning. I do an electrocardiogram in class. I discuss metal detectors. I discuss musical instrument. Magnetic levitation. I talk about Northern Lights which is very relevant to electricity and magnetism. I spend almost a whole lecture on particle accelerators. I tell them why the sunsets are red and why the skies are blue. I talk about rainbows, about halos, about glories. I talk about color perception and since I do Doppler effect I also talk about Big Bang cosmology and then during my very last lecture I introduce them to my research, the research I did during my early days at MIT when I was making x-ray observations from very high flying balloons. Altitudes of 140, 150 thousand feet. So my goal is wherever possible to make them see through the equations to make them see the beauty all around them and by doing that to make them love physics. Well the 802 course is the second course in physics, it's, it's mandatory. It's what we call a general Institute requirement. You either have to take this course or you have to take one which is a slightly higher level 802-2. So it is the, it is the bases that students get during their first year. 801, the Newtonian mechanics and then 802, the electricity and magnetism. And if they go into physics of course they get a lot more but if they never go into physics then this is all they will ever see about physics which is quite a lot actually. We evaluate the students through traditional exams. The lectures are given in the main lecture hall of MIT and then the students meet in smaller groups with professors. We call those recitations which is largely problem-solving. There are many events in this course. Every lecture is an event and the students who have taken me will tell you that indeed going to my lectures is an event. I'm not a very traditional lecturer so therefore I would really like to think that each lecture is an event we do have a contest which is very very popular. We hand to the students a piece of wood, some copper wire, a few paper clips and two magnets and the goal is to make an electric motor and they get course credits depending upon how fast their motor is going. And this is really a real happening. It's an incredible event and some of the motors are extraordinary in their design. If you and I would try to build a motor you'll be lucky if you, if your motor rotates 400 revolutions per minute. but let me tell you some students go to 5000 revolutions per minute mark. Really quite amazing and they spend so much time on that. It is wonderfull event it is really a happening. Well my message to all educators is-- what counts is not what you cover but what counts is what you uncover and this is often forgotten so there is a general tendency, not everyone, but the general tendency to ram too much down the throats of the students and overlook that that's very anti productive because it goes one ear in, as we say in Holland, and it goes the other ear out again. So what you cover is not what matters but what you uncover is what matters and if you can somehow do it so that there are parts of the course that they will remember for the rest of their lives that's even more important. If a student has come to my lectures on rainbows and halos and glories, for the rest of their lives rainbows will never the same and they will always think of me when they see a rainbow and in fact sometimes twenty or thirty years after a lecture they send me still pictures and they say: "Professor Lewin I saw a rainbow and I thought of you and here's a picture". And the interesting thing is they sometimes send me a picture which is not even a rainbow which is a glory but that doesn't matter. What it shows is that I have succeeded in making them love physics and that's my goal. And that should be the goal of every educator, to make them love physics.