Classical Mechanics

8.01SC is MIT's first physics course, an introduction to classical mechanics, in the OpenCourseWare Scholar format built for independent learners from the fall 2016 edition taught by Deepto Chakrabarty, Peter Dourmashkin, Michelle Tomasik, Anna Frebel and Vladan Vuletic. The course introduces the core concepts of space, time, mass, force, momentum, torque and angular momentum, developed historically to explain planetary motion, and it studies two parallel approaches to the same problems: forces, and conservation laws involving energy, momentum and angular momentum. The stated goals are a conceptual understanding of the core ideas, familiarity with the experimental verification of the theory, and the ability to apply the framework to describe and predict how bodies move.

The material is arranged by week, beginning with a review of vectors, then kinematics, Newton's laws, circular motion, drag forces and constraints, momentum and impulse, continuous mass transfer, and kinetic energy and work, continuing through the rest of the mechanics syllabus. Each lesson is a set of short lecture videos with worked examples and a problem set, backed by an online textbook and readings. Everything is free to use under a Creative Commons licence, no account is needed and no certificate is available.