Open course ware

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] PROFESSOR: Yeah, so I'm Hong, so you can just call me Hong. I'm a theoretical physicist. I work on high energy theory, including string theory, quantum gravity, non equilibrium statistical physics, et cetera, and many different topics. So now let me say a few words regarding the QFT, the quantum field theory itself. So the goal of this quantum field theory class is to develop concepts, formalism, and techniques for quantum dynamics of fields. Say, I'm sure all of you have studied Maxwell's equations, OK? So Maxwell's equations describe fully classical dynamics of electric and magnetic fields. But we live in the quantum world, and so we should also treat electric and magnetic fields using quantum language, OK? And then you find that once you do that, and then the concept of photon, once you treat the electric field and the magnetic field quantum mechanically, and then you get the concept of the photon. And the photon no...

ERIK DEMAINE: Yeah, so one of the exciting parts of this class is that we ran an optional session where whoever is interested in doing the research side of the material could solve open problems together. So we call this a problem-solving session. But it's-- all the problems are unsolved in the field. And so it's not a required part of the class, because it's OK to just learn the material. But if you really want to engage with what we're learning about, then you should try to advance the field and solve new problems beyond what we know how to solve. And so every week I have this session for two hours. That seems to be about the sweet spot. And I would come with a couple of new open problems inspired by the material that we've just covered in the last week of lectures. So this is, I find, a really powerful combination in teaching, where you've just covered in one week the latest that everyone knows. Everyone's at the state of the art. They'v...

PROFESSOR 1: Yeah, any questions about this? Yeah. AUDIENCE: I actually have two. One's an incidental question. You keep mentioning something that I never heard of called "ardeeno", or something like that. PROFESSOR 1: Yes. AUDIENCE: What is that? PROFESSOR 1: Arduino is a tiny little microcontroller-- not related to video games, really. But it's a tiny little microcontroller. And you connect it up to a circuit, and then it can tell an LED to blink every five seconds. And it can detect when you press a button, and it can read off of a light sensor, whether the lights are on. So it's a little kind of computer chip that you program to do one particular task that connects out to the world. AUDIENCE: So then the more generally-- I'm curious what the connection with Kinect is in this course. If we didn't want to use Kinect, is that an option? The reason I'm a little nervous is because I don't own one, and I don't have access to one. So...