Cisse: I believe that a student who comes to MIT is looking to answer questions that
others have not been able to answer. And
anyone who is interested in that would
greatly benefit from a training that
includes a rigorous training in physics
as it's being taught here.
Physics is a really solid 
framework on which to understand nature
from a very fundamental and mathematical
standpoint. The two classes 8.01 and 8.02,
represent the subject matters of classical mechanics, and electricity and magnetism, respectively.
So in the first
class 8.01, students are learning about
problem solving, based on some things
that they have intuition on. It's the
everyday world. Things that they can see,
things that they can experience. And
probably when they make a calculation,
they make a prediction, they could check
and say, 'this doesn't make sense.' I know
that when the elevator is going up, and I
accelerate, I feel like my weight has
gone up, right? So the calculation gives
me something that I should be able to
check intuitively. Well, by the time they
get to 8.02 in electricity and
magnetism, now they're dealing with a
mathematical intuition that doesn't
always check with what they've
experienced in everyday life. Electric
fields and magnetic fields are not
things that most of us have an intuitive
understanding on. The primary lecture is
actually so-called TEAL format:
Technology Enabled Active Learning.
The TEAL format is active, it's interactive,
it's learning by doing, but it's also
collaborative. You are coming in to
engage with the material,
and engage with the rest of your
classmates. It's not your classical
lecture where you're sitting and
watching the professor. Here students are
actually doing much of the work.
Students are often surprised when I tell
them, "You know what, I'm going to ask you this problem that you're going to solve.
And in fact, I don't want you to memorize
the formula. I will give you the physics
formula if you want,"  It's no longer their
high school physics. In high school
physics they've encountered F=ma.
In the physics that they encounter at
MIT, well, the subtleties of the acceleration,
whether you are in an inertial reference
frame or a non-inertial reference frame,
now that starts to matter. It's all about
the subtleties and really deeply
understanding what the physics is
teaching you. Those formulas represent a
certain underlying truth about nature
and that's what they're really exploring
here.  People who have studied physics
have gone on and done extraordinarily
well, on many other fields.  Some of the
greatest, numerical solutions in
computer science come from framing
problems in physics. And then taking
those complex problems, and then putting them mathematically and then realizing
that, 'Oh! Maybe we don't have the
mathematics to actually answer this
question', right?  So the physics has played its role, which is to take this complex
problem and break it down and frame it
in a quantitative manner.
Student: Oh, I think it's because this is, like sitting on top of...
Cisse:  What I tell my students is that, when I'm teaching them how to solve a problem, I'm not teaching
them how to solve this specific problem. 
I'm teaching them an approach to solve
any kind of problem.
Student:  Oh, whoa!  It does work.  Crazy!
