Episode 4: Inertia - The Mechanical Universe

Episode 4. Inertia: Galileo risks his favored status to answer the questions of the universe with his law of inertia.

“The Mechanical Universe,” is a critically-acclaimed series of 52 thirty-minute videos covering the basic topics of an introductory university physics course.

Each program in the series opens and closes with Caltech Professor David Goodstein providing philosophical, historical and often humorous insight into the subject at hand while lecturing to his freshman physics class. The series contains hundreds of computer animation segments, created by Dr. James F. Blinn, as the primary tool of instruction. Dynamic location footage and historical re-creations are also used to stress the fact that science is a human endeavor. 

The series was originally produced as a broadcast telecourse in 1985 by Caltech and Intelecom, Inc. with program funding from the Annenberg/CPB Project.

The online version of the series is sponsored by the Information Science and Technology initiative at Caltech. http://ist.caltech.edu

©1985 California Institute of Technology, The Corporation for Community College Television, and The Annenberg/CPB Project