Project Tuva

Last updated

Project Tuva was a collaborative research project between Bill Gates and Microsoft Research in 2009 demonstrating the potential value of an interactive video player platform for learning.

Contents

Overview

The platform hosted the Messenger Lectures series titled The Character of Physical Law given at Cornell University by Richard Feynman in 1964 and recorded by the BBC. [1] According to his video introduction, Gates saw the lectures when he was younger. [2] He enjoyed the physics concepts and Feynman's lecturing style, and later acquired the rights to make the video available to the public. He hopes that this will encourage others to make educational content available for free. [3]

Project Tuva was officially released at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, July 13 and 14, 2009. [4] At its inception, Project Tuva included video of the lectures with expert commentary from Stephen D. Ellis of the University of Washington and the Student Physics Society at the University of Washington. The Silverlight application also includes text search over transcripts (which are shown synchronized with the video), support for time-stamped note-taking, and "Extras" that complement the video with external links, formulae, interactive demonstrations, and embedded WorldWide Telescope astronomical objects and tours. Upon release the Extras and commentary were only available for the first of the seven lectures: The Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law. In April 2011, Tuva was updated with new content and extras curated by MIT Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics Robert Jaffe. Then, in July 2016, the Project Tuva Silverlight application was retired.

The project gets its name from a late-life goal of Feynman's; namely, that he would someday travel to the Siberian land of Tuva. [5] Unfortunately, he was never allowed to travel to Tuva during his lifetime, with permission from the Soviet government coming the day following his death. The name then invokes the idea that a dream of his is now accomplished – not, of course, traveling to Tuva, but rather that the world may now be able to appreciate physics the way he did.

Content released under Project Tuva

Content NumberTitleNarrated ByDurationLink
IntroductionRichard Feynman: Making Science Easy Bill Gates 2:16
#1Law of Gravitation — An Example of Physical Law Richard Feynman 55:37
#2The Relation of Mathematics and Physics Richard Feynman 55:32
#3The Great Conservation Principles Richard Feynman 56:03
#4Symmetry in Physical Law Richard Feynman 57:06
#5The Distinction of the Past and Future Richard Feynman 46:00
#6Probability and Uncertainty – The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature Richard Feynman 56:32
#7Seeking New Laws Richard Feynman 57:56

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to physics:

Richard Feynman American theoretical physicist (1918–1988)

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.

Brownian ratchet Perpetual motion device

In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, the Brownian ratchet or Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet is an apparent perpetual motion machine of the second kind, first analysed in 1912 as a thought experiment by Polish physicist Marian Smoluchowski. It was popularised by American Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman in a physics lecture at the California Institute of Technology on May 11, 1962, during his Messenger Lectures series The Character of Physical Law in Cornell University in 1964 and in his text The Feynman Lectures on Physics as an illustration of the laws of thermodynamics. The simple machine, consisting of a tiny paddle wheel and a ratchet, appears to be an example of a Maxwell's demon, able to extract mechanical work from random fluctuations (heat) in a system at thermal equilibrium, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Detailed analysis by Feynman and others showed why it cannot actually do this.

Adobe Shockwave is a discontinued multimedia platform for building interactive multimedia applications and video games. Developers originate content using Adobe Director and publish it on the Internet. Such content could be viewed in a web browser on any computer with the Shockwave Player plug-in installed. MacroMind originated the technology; Macromedia acquired MacroMind and developed it further, releasing Shockwave Player in 1995. Adobe then acquired Shockwave with Macromedia in 2005. Shockwave supports raster graphics, basic vector graphics, 3D graphics, audio, and an embedded scripting language called Lingo.

A rich web application is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software. The concept is closely related to a single-page application, and may allow the user interactive features such as drag and drop, background menu, WYSIWYG editing, etc. The concept was first introduced in 2002 by Macromedia to describe Macromedia Flash MX product. Throughout the 2000-s, the term was generalized to describe web applications developed with other competing browser plugin technologies including Java applets, Microsoft Silverlight.

Live Connect

Live Connect is a collection of APIs and common controls that allow developers to have a deeper control and offers access to the core Windows Live services and data through open and easily accessible application programming interfaces (APIs). At MIX07, Microsoft's Senior Architect Danny Thorpe described:

[The Windows Live Platform] today can combine video, photos, contacts, maps, and search into web applications. Users can drop web controls into the web applications with just a few lines of JavaScript and be up and running in a matter of minutes, and they can dive a little deeper to access service APIs directly and define their own UI and process flow. Users have control over what applications can access their private data, and can revoke that access at any time.

Microsoft Silverlight Application framework for writing and running rich Internet applications

Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later versions supported multimedia, graphics, and animation, and gave support to developers for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight was one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages using Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.

Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms.

Microsoft PixelSense Interactive surface computing platform by Microsoft

Microsoft PixelSense is an interactive surface computing platform that allows one or more people to use and touch real-world objects, and share digital content at the same time. The PixelSense platform consists of software and hardware products that combine vision based multitouch PC hardware, 360-degree multiuser application design, and Windows software to create a natural user interface (NUI).

MIX was a Microsoft conference held annually for web developers and designers at which Microsoft showcased upcoming web technologies. The conference was held each spring at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Unlike many of Microsoft's technical conference, MIX has been promoted more heavily to designers by inviting popular speakers from other popular web design conferences, such as SXSW, and has sponsored a CSS design contest each year to promote the conference. Microsoft has also used this conference as an opportunity to promote new web design and development tools such as Silverlight and Microsoft Expression Studio.

Moonlight (runtime) Implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for some Unix-based operating systems

Moonlight was a free and open source implementation for Linux and other Unix-based operating systems of the now deprecated Microsoft Silverlight application framework, developed and then abandoned by the Mono Project. Like Silverlight, Moonlight was a web application framework which provided capabilities similar to those of Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment.

Tafiti Discontinued animated search engine launched by Microsoft Corp.

Tafiti was an animated search engine launched by Microsoft Corp. and TrappsInteractive to showcase the Silverlight animation and video player.

Deep Zoom

Deep Zoom is a technology developed by Microsoft for efficiently transmitting and viewing images. It allows users to pan around and zoom in a large, high resolution image or a large collection of images. It reduces the time required for initial load by downloading only the region being viewed or only at the resolution it is displayed at. Subsequent regions are downloaded as the user pans to them; animations are used to hide any jerkiness in the transition. The libraries are also available in other platforms including Java and Flash.

Microsoft Kin

Kin was a short-lived mobile phone line from Microsoft designed for users of social networking. The phones, aimed at people between ages 15 and 30, were manufactured by Sharp Corporation and sold through Verizon Wireless.

The Messenger Lectures are a series of talks given by scholars and public figures at Cornell University. They were founded in 1924 by a gift from Hiram Messenger of "a fund to provide a course of lectures on the Evolution of Civilization for the special purpose of raising the moral standard of our political, business, and social life", to be "delivered by the ablest non-resident lecturer or lecturers obtainable". The lecture series has been described as one of Cornell's most important of extracurricular activities.

Microsoft Live Labs Pivot Data exploration tool by Microsoft

Pivot is a software application from Microsoft Live Labs that allows users to interact with and search large amounts of data. It is based on Microsoft's Seadragon. It has been described as allowing users to view the web as a web rather than as isolated pages.

<i>The Feynman Lectures on Physics</i> Textbook by Richard Feynman

The Feynman Lectures on Physics is a physics textbook based on some lectures by Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate who has sometimes been called "The Great Explainer". The lectures were presented before undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), during 1961–1963. The book's co-authors are Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands.

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing and running rich web applications that was actively developed and marketed by Microsoft from 2007 to 2012. This is a technical overview of the platform's history.

ChronoZoom

ChronoZoom is a free open source project that visualizes time on the broadest possible scale from the Big Bang to the present day. Conceived by Walter Alvarez and Roland Saekow and developed by the department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley in collaboration with Microsoft Research and Moscow State University, Alvarez unveiled the first ChronoZoom prototype at UC Berkeley's 2010 Faculty Research Lecture. Although that demo is no longer available to the public online, a second version rewritten in HTML5 is now available and open source. ChronoZoom was inspired by the study of Big History, and it approaches the documentation and visualization of time and history in the same way that Google Earth deals with geography. ChronoZoom allows users to see the true scale of time over cosmic, geologic, biological and social periods.

Minute Physics Educational YouTube channel

Minute Physics is an educational YouTube channel created by Henry Reich in 2011. The channel's videos use whiteboard animation to explain physics-related topics in approximately one minute. As of June 2020, the channel has over 5 million subscribers.

References

  1. ↑ Morgan, Timothy Prickett (15 July 2009). "Microsoft hosts Feynman lecture series". The Register. Retrieved 29 June 2015.
  2. ↑ Access Project Tuva for Free, Courtesy of Bill Gates
  3. ↑ Bill Gates offers the world a physics lesson
  4. ↑ "Project Tuva: An interactive video application developed for Microsoft Research". Archived from the original on 2009-07-19. Retrieved 2009-07-15.
  5. ↑ Leighton, Ralph (1991). Tuva or Bust! . W. W. Norton. ISBN   0-393-32069-3.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.