Talks (Lectures)

The academic lecture hasn’t improved since its likely invention by the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians. They lectured using cuneiform with styli on clay tablets—not much different from today’s chalk-and-talk black- or white-board lectures! So, lectures have been time-consuming to prepare, difficult to deliver, dull, and easily forgotten for 5000 years! Even worse, every lecture must still be prepared and delivered individually and hence massively redundantly every day by lecturers around the world. This means that today’s lectures are also essentially analogous to books, pre-Gutenberg! Indeed, tens of billions of human-hours are expended annually on lecture preparation by all the world’s post-primary-school teachers and professors! Just think of what teachers could do with that extra time. So, I’ve decided to prove that high-quality entire-course video lectures should be created and disseminated to the world for free. They’d save teachers innumerable hours and provide students with much higher-quality audio and video. They can be watched at leisure and even multiple times. Here's a link to my narrated talk about them:
"Re-Inventing the Lecture" 
by Rick Trebino (35 minutes) The cost to create nearly professional entire-course videos for all common post-primary-school courses is a tiny fraction of that spent preparing lectures worldwide in just one year. Do you know a charitable foundation that might be interested in funding such a project? I think it could save the world.
So far, they’re working extremely well in my courses!

 

The mp4 versions of the narrated lectures are best (I've edited out all the Power Point rendering bugs using Premiere Pro).  You can (and should!) download them and play them on an iPad or Android tablet or laptop.  They should run perfectly.

 

It's best to download the Power Point versions to a computer.

 

The text in the unnarrated Optics lectures has also been translated into Spanish, French, and Chinese.  But they're old versions of the lectures.  If you run the newer, narrated Power Point versions with Internet access, Power Point can add subtitles in almost any language you like.

 

I continually update and improve most of the English-version lectures. 
So, if you plan to use them, be sure to download the latest versions.

 

If you send any improvements, corrections, or additions to me, Prof. Trebino, I will try to incorporate them into the files.  And please let me know if you're using them, and share with me your experiences using them.  Thanks!

 

Finally, the Fair Use Doctrine allows for the non-commercial use of the images and gifs in these lectures.  Every effort has been made to cite and credit those responsible for them.  If your image or gif has been accidentally or incorrectly cited (or not cited), please let me know, and I'll fix this as soon as possible.

Below are my narrated entire-semester-course lectures on Modern Physics and Optics and also my un-narrated lectures on Ultrafast Optics and Nonlinear Optics as well as some research talks. You have permission to use them for your course or other non-commercial application.

Optics Course

Now fully narrated!

Modern Physics Course

Now fully narrated!

Ultrafast Optics Course

Additional Research Talks & Short Courses

Nonlinear Optics Course

Watch my colloquium talk, complete with narration.

This approximately 50-minute talk is a nice introduction to our research.

You can also download some of my group's research lectures:

All of these lectures are available on both  frog.gatech.edu and ricktrebino.com.