Bill Gates: 'We're going to make the cows that don't fart'

It's been a year since Bill Gates left full-time work at Microsoft, but he's found plenty to keep him busy.

In between trying to eradicate polio, tame malaria, and fix the broken US education system, Gates has managed to fulfil a dream of taking some classic physics lectures and making them available free over the web. The lectures, done in 1964 by noted scientist (and Manhattan Project collaborator) Richard Feynman, take notions such as gravity and explains how they work and the broad implications they have in understanding the ways of the universe.

Gates first saw the series of lectures 20 years ago on vacation and dreamed of being able to make them broadly available. After spending years tracking down the rights - and spending some of his personal fortune - Gates has done just that. Tapping his colleagues in Redmond to create interactive software to accompany the videos, Gates is making the collection available free from the Microsoft Research website.

Gates said that he hoped his action would serve as a model for taking great educational content and making it broadly available for free.

"When a lecture is presented as well as this, it draws more people in to understanding science." Gates told silicon.com sister site CNET News. "And over time I hope there's more like this."

In a wide-ranging interview, Gates also reflected on the changes at Microsoft, spilled the beans on the expansive vision for Product Natal and shared his thoughts on Google's just-introduced Chrome OS. Here's an edited transcript of that interview.

You first saw these videos on a vacation 20 years ago. Do you want to talk a little bit about how that happened, and what your reaction was to seeing those lectures?
Gates: Yes. I was in a period where, in order to learn new science, thought it would be a fun thing to see what films there were, and we went to some university catalogues, including University of California system had a catalogue of films, and got a lot of health, biology, physics type films - those are those metal cans with big reels - and then we had a projector in a room that we made dark. So even [during] the day, you could thread these films. And there were a lot of interesting ones, but these Feynman lectures that he gave at Cornell...those were just unbelievably good.

After that, I got them put onto videotape, and I got rights to make a small number of videotapes. It was VHS tape at the time, and send it around to some friends who might be interested. But I always had in the back of my mind that it was kind of a crime that there wasn't broad availability of those things, particularly for young people thinking about science.

And so I sort of had this project in mind, and [have been] making some progress in understanding who had the rights, and eventually doing deals for the rights, and then getting these things scanned, and then getting Microsoft Research agreed to host the stuff and create some innovative software around it, which Curtis [Wong] has run. It's taken a long time, but with lots of PCs and the internet, and my willingness to spend some money, now these things are just going to be out there.

What do you hope people get out of these videos? Who is your ideal audience for them?
Gates: Well, I didn't get to see these until I was about 30, and so I would love it if lots of young people saw them, and got a sense of the fun, and how science works, and what's complicated, and what's not. I hope some people who teach science are inspired by the way that Feynman managed to make it interesting without giving up the depth of how it works.

With super-high-quality material like this up there for free, I hope people see the potential, and that they'd benefit from this one in particular, and then it starts to push forward the idea if someone is great lecturer, then their work should be out there and available.

I've heard you talk about the way community college really should change, and really what we should be doing for some of these subjects that are somewhat universal is taking really the best explanations, the best lectures out there, and making those broadly available, and then focusing sort of the local learning around discussion and different sorts of things.
Gates: That's right. Education, particularly if you've got motivated students, the idea of specialising in the brilliant lecture and text being done in a very high-quality way, and shared by everyone, and then the sort of lab and discussion piece that's a different thing that you pick people who are very good at that.

Technology brings more to the lecture availability, in terms of sharing best practices and letting somebody have more resources to do amazing lectures. So, you'd hope that some schools would be open-minded to...

Click here to read page two of this article