Project Tuva was a collaborative research project between

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

and

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

in 2009 demonstrating the potential value of an interactive video player platform for learning.

Overview

The platform hosted the

Messenger Lectures 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 sp ...

series titled ''

The Character of Physical Law ''The Character of Physical Law'' is a series of seven lectures by physicist Richard Feynman concerning the nature of the laws of physics. Feynman delivered the lectures in 1964 at Cornell University, as part of the Messenger Lectures series. Th ...

'' given at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

Richard Feynman Richard Phillips Feynman (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) 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 superflu ...

in 1964 and recorded by the BBC. According to his video introduction, Gates saw the lectures when he was younger. 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. Project Tuva was officially released at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, July 13 and 14, 2009. 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 Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe Inc., Adobe's Run time environment, runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a v ...

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 WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is manage ...

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 Robert Loren Jaffe (born May 23, 1946) is an American physicist and the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was formerly director of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. Biograp ...

. Then, in July 2016, the Project Tuva

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 Tuva (; russian: Тува́) or Tyva ( tyv, Тыва), officially the Republic of Tuva (russian: Респу́блика Тыва́, r=Respublika Tyva, p=rʲɪˈspublʲɪkə tɨˈva; tyv, Тыва Республика, translit=Tyva Respublika ...

. 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

References

{{reflist

External links

Feynman's Messenger LecturesThe best teacher I never had
Microsoft software Bill Gates Richard Feynman