He may look like the absent-minded professor from the movie "Back to the Future", but 71-year old Walter Levin is one of the world's most popular professors, thanks to his unconventional ways of revealing the beauty of science to his students and people all around the world.

Mr. Levin, who teaches physics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in America, says that it took him a decade to realize that what he uncovered was more important than what he covered and that memorization of formulas and equations was not the most effective way of teaching. He therefore started to employ unconventional methods to ensure that his students really understood the principles of physics.

At the end of a recent lecture Mr. Levin, dressed like he was going on an African safari, fired a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey (wearing a bullet-proof vest), to demonstrate the trajectories (paths) of objects in a free fall.

Another time he sucked up some helium and sounded like Daffy Duck, to demonstrate that different gases travel at different speeds.To demonstrate that a pendulum's cycle is not affected by the weight at the end, he dangled himself below a large one and swung back and forth (see picture above).

In his most nerve-racking and popular lecture yet, he demonstrates Hooke's law by putting his face in the path of a 33-pound steel ball. In the experiment, he holds the heavy ball near his face and tells his students that if he touches the ball even slightly, rather than allowing it to move in its own momentum, it will hit and smash his face. The students watch with abated breath as the ball swings back and forth, almost, but not quite hitting Mr. Levin. After seeing this, very few of Mr. Levin's students will forget Hooke's law, exactly what the professor is striving for!

Each day, thousands of people, some of whom have never taken one course in Physics, watch the lectures online and wish that they had had someone as amazing as Arthur Levin when they were growing up!

The two videos below show the amazing professor in action.

Sources: YahooNews, NYT.com