What drove Einstein crazy?

It’s a simple question.

The answer is also simple—sort of.

Here’s Professor Barton Zwiebach in his video lecture segment “Photons and the loss of determinism,” just published on OCW as part of 8.04 Quantum Physics I:

. . . and now you have found a situation in which an identical set of experiments with identically prepared objects sometimes gives you different results. It's a debacle. It's a total disaster. What seems to have happened here? You suddenly have identical photons, and sometimes they go through [a polarizing filter], and sometimes they don't go through. And therefore, you've lost predictability. It's so simple to show that, if photons exist, you lose predictability. And that's what drove Einstein crazy.

• 21H.331 Julius Caesar and the Fall of the Roman Republic

• 21A.111J For Love and Money: Rethinking the Family
• 2.854 Introduction to Manufacturing Systems

Try to remember: When was the last time an instructor sent you out to watch the traffic go by?

Not recently?

For students taking Frederick Salvucci’s 1.252J Urban Transportation Planning, whose site has just appeared on OCW, it was just the other day.

For the first of four main assignments in the course, Salvucci sends students out in groups to four different intersections and has them count what goes by. The point is “to get students used to thinking about quantities: How many bicycles? How many people in buses? How many people in cars? How many trucks? How many cabs are going down the street? What problems do you observe at that intersection?” Salvucci explains his thinking in his Instructor Insights on the site’s This Course at MIT page.

Initial outcomes of MIT’s first MicroMasters program in Supply Chain Management

Professor Yossi Sheffi, Director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), and Vice President for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma spoke to Inside Higher Ed last week on the initial outcomes of MIT’s first MicroMasters program in Supply Chain Management. They tell the site that they are “floored” by the quality of candidates in the first batch of applications to the blended Master’s degree program. The success thus far of the model is making the CTL reconsider the use of standardized tests in their application process and is exciting other departments around MIT to consider their own MicroMasters programs. Read more at Inside Higher Ed.
 
The next opportunity to join the introductory course for the MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management, is coming up! Supply Chain Analytics starts September 13, 2017.

We know you’ve seen the back-to-school ads on TV and the sales on pencils and backpacks in stores. Let’s pretend that’s not happening. You’ve still got weeks of summer vacation left, we hope. There will be plenty of time later to make lesson plans. In the meantime, get inspired by these stories of how fellow educators, students and homeschool parents are using OpenCourseWare:

• A struggling high school student turned to OCW for help, gaining the confidence to apply to MIT. He became the first person in the history of his school to be accepted at MIT.
• A computer science competition for girls was inspired by OpenCourseWare to make their curriculum materials freely available. 

Learn more about these stories and others in the “Examples of How OCW Has Been Used” section on Highlights for High School.