YEN-JIE LEE: I decided to include a lot of demos
during my lectures.
That is because I believe to learn physics,
you have to know how to convert everything into mathematics.
You want to work on the mathematics
and to make predictions, and finally, you
want to compare the predictions to experimental data.
Demonstrations are particularly useful because I
would like to show that the mathematics we
covered during the classroom actually
have a lot of consequence.
It's actually really to do with what
nature does to all the physical systems we are interested.
So that's actually why we first--
usually the structure is like this.
We first introduce the physical situation
we are interested then we use the concepts
and the mathematics to solve the physical system,
and finally, the last part is to enjoy what we have
learned from this hard work.
To compare our mathematical solution to reality,
which is actually the demo.
So that is actually why I introduce so many demos
during the class, and those, I do think,
using those demos people will remember more
about the conclusion we can actually
get from the mathematics instead of
overwhelmed by a lot of calculations during the class.
There are so many interesting demos which we covered.
One of my favorite demos is the Bell wave machine.
First of all, it's really a very beautiful demo.
It is so beautiful to see the sinusoidal wave.
It can be produced from this simple device.
Secondly, you you can actually manipulate them,
you can connect them to each other,
and you can see waves essentially bouncing
between systems, and then you can see the reflection
of the traveling wave.
It's so beautiful, and that's actually my favorite demo
during the class.
I believe most of the students are also
interested in that demo very, very much.