"I taught Physics 1... [b]ut not from the Feynman books ...We used some conventional textbook ...but I sort of redesigned the course. ...By the time I started teaching it the second time, I started to get worried, because... I would go on teaching the same course forever... [or] I would leave it and somebody else would teach it and it would become a completely different course... One way of preserving memory is to write a textbook, but I had already written States of Matter...been there, done that. I didn’t want to do that. And then it occurred to me that television was bound to play some role in the future of education. ...What I vaguely had in mind was that the lecture could be taped by a television camera at the back of the room."
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David Goodstein
(April 5, 1939 – April 10, 2024) was an American physicist and served as professor of physics and as Vice-provost at the . He wrote several books, including ' (1996). In the 1980s he was the director and host of ', an educational television series on physics that was adapted for high school use and translated into many other languages. The series garnered more than a dozen prestigious awards, including the 1987 Japan Prize for television.
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