Coronavirus Lockdown: 12,000 sign up for HC Verma’s physics classes

NEW DELHI: The renowned and much-loved physics professor, H C Verma, is returning to class, albeit online.

Along with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur, Verma will teach concepts of physics over eight weeks starting April 2. Outside the IIT system, Verma, who retired in 2017, is best-known for his popular textbooks, Concepts of Physics, for secondary school.

Now, Verma, along with the Centre for Continuing Education at IIT Kanpur, will offer the 24-hour course which will be spread over two months. Titled “Stay Home and Revise Physics”, or SHARP, it comes just at the right time, when the country is under a 21-day lockdown imposed to control the spread of the novel coronavirus.

‘Overwhelming response’

Since the website opened for registration on March 30, it has received an overwhelming response. “Till today morning, over 12,000 people have registered on the portal,” Verma told Careers360. “Of them, around 1,500 are below 15 years of age.”

The maximum number of candidates, 6000, are from the age group 16-20 years. Around 2,700, are aged 21 to 25 years and, interestingly, around 400 are over 45.

Verma said that he himself will be himself delivering the two-month-long course, with 24 lectures of roughly half an hour each. He said: “The speciality of this course is learning physics through simple experiments.” He added that the experiments are so simple that even a child of 13-14 years can reconstruct those experiments easily and learn from them.

The lessons

Verma will begin with optics on April 2 and stay on it for two week. That will be followed by mechanics and then, electricity and magnetism. The final two weeks will be on oscillation and waves.

This course will cover some basic principles of physics and Verma will describe them through a few simple experiments. In some cases, the phenomena will be shown first and then explained.

Explaining the modalities of the programme, Verma said that to do this course the candidate does not need any special infrastructure beyond a mobile phone with an internet connection. “They can also send questions to me through the website and I will try to answer as many questions as possible. I am hoping that everyone will learn, enjoy and revise physics through this,” he said.

Participants will be given certificates from the Centre for Continuing Education (CCE), IIT Kanpur, depending on the attendance.

Abhay Karandikar, director IIT Kanpur said that this course is designed for school students of Class 9 onwards and college students but even physics teachers or, indeed, anyone interested is welcome to join.

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