It has been a year since Bill Gates left full-time work at Microsoft, but he has found plenty to keep him busy.
In between trying to eradicate polio, tame malaria and fix the US education system, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has managed to fulfill a dream of making a series of classic physics lectures available for free over the web.
The lectures, by noted scientist (and Manhattan Project collaborator) Richard Feynman in 1964, take notions such as gravity and explain how they work and the broad implications they have in understanding the universe.
Gates first saw the lectures 20 years ago and dreamed of being able to making them available to a wider audience. After spending years tracking down the rights — and spending some of his personal fortune — he has done just that. Tapping his Microsoft colleagues to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collection available free from the Microsoft Research website.
Gates said hoped his action would serve as a model for making great educational content broadly available for free.
"When a lecture is presented as well as this, it draws more people in to understanding science," Gates said. "And over time, I hope there's more like this."
In a wide-ranging interview with ZDNet UK's sister site, CNET News.com, Gates also reflected on the changes at Microsoft and the expansive vision for Product Natal, and shared his thoughts on Google's recently introduced Chrome OS.
Q: You first saw these videos while on holiday 20 years ago. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that happened and what your reaction was to seeing those lectures?
A: Yes. I was in a period where, in order to learn new science, I thought it would be a fun thing to see what films there were. We went to some university catalogues, including the University of California catalogue which of a lot of health, biology, physics-type films — those metal cans with big reels — and we had a projector in a room that we made dark. So even during the day, you could thread these films.
And there were a lot of interesting ones, but these lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell… those were just unbelievably good.
After that, I got them put onto videotape, and I got rights to make a small number of videotapes. It was VHS tape at the time, and I sent it around to some friends who I thought might be interested. But I always had in the back of my mind that it was kind of a crime that there wasn't broad availability of those things, particularly for young people thinking about science.
And so I sort of had this project in mind, and made some progress in understanding who had the rights, eventually doing deals for the rights, and then getting these things scanned. Microsoft Research agreed to host the stuff and create some innovative software around it, which [principal researcher] Curtis Wong has run. It's taken a long time, but with lots of PCs and the internet, and my willingness to spend some money, now these things are just going to be out there.
What do you hope people get out of these videos? Who is your ideal audience for them?
Well, I didn't get to see these until I was about 30, and so I would love it if lots of young people saw them and got a sense of the fun, and how science works, and what's complicated and what's not. I hope some people who teach science are inspired by the way that Feynman managed to make it interesting without giving up the depth of how it works.
With super high-quality material like this available for free, I hope people see the potential, and that they'd benefit from this one in particular. Then it starts to push forward the idea [that] if someone is a great lecturer, then their work should be available.
I've heard you talk about the way community college really should change, and what we should be doing for some of these subjects that are somewhat universal is taking the best explanations, the best lectures out there, and making those broadly available, and then focusing the local learning around discussion and different sorts of things.
That's right. Education, particularly if you've got motivated students, the idea of specialising in the brilliant lecture, and text being done in a very high-quality way, and shared by everyone; and then [there's] the sort of lab and discussion piece that's a different thing, [so] you pick people who are very good at that.
Technology should bring more to lecture availability, in terms of sharing best practices and allowing people to have more resources to do amazing lectures. So you'd hope that some schools would be open minded to this fitting in, and making them more effective.
But you've also got people who like to teach themselves and like to learn things, and yet find science kind of daunting. And when a lecture is presented as well as this, it draws more people in...
Talkback
The Feynman lectures he's talking about are great. Thanks for getting the rights and publishing the films. How about helping out the MIT OCW?
Call me a cynic, but if Bill <i>really</i> wanted to be nice, rather than trying to foist Sliverlight on everyone, he'd make these videos available in a format that pretty much everyone could use (eg, Flash video) or an vendor-neutral format.
And yes, I know that you can get a Sliverlight-cloned system under Linux (Moonlight), but this is still encumbered technology, and I don't want to install yet another piece of software, when Flash works fine, and I can use MPlayer under Linux to plays Flash videos.
But then again, this is nothing new for Microsoft.
Conz won't VLC player do it for you?
I don't know if VLC will work with Silverlight video streams; to my understanding, the only technology which will is Mono's Moonlight, which, for various reasons, I'm not keen to install on my PC.
However, the key point is, that once again, Microsoft invokes the Not Invented Here mechanism, and tries to foist its own proprietary technology on us, when there are perfectly viable (and widespread!) existing technologies (both proprietary and open) which will do the job.
The job, that is, of video streaming.
But not the job of trying to spread Silverlight, which is why Microsoft tries to crowbar its reach as far and as wide as their influence in the IT industry allows.
Thankfully, that influence has been waning in the IT industry these past ten years, so Microsoft's success with Silverlight has been limited.