Eye Opener

In the cold dark before winter dawn, by the TV screen's eerie blue glare, the show's rumpled star looks like an insomniac alchemist. With spectacles sliding down his nose, he brews electrons, protons and mesons while evoking Newton, Faraday, Planck, Einstein and Heisenberg. To watch NBC's Continental Classroom (6:307 a.m.), some 275,000 Americans are sacrificing sleep for science five days a week.

Classroom was fathered last October by The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. It was mainly designed to upgrade science teaching in U.S. high schools, whose best teachers have long been lured by more money in industry. With NBC affiliates donating the early half-hour on 149 network stations (151 next semester), the $1,112,000 project was financed by the Ford Foundation and hefty grants from industry (Bell Telephone, Standard Oil of California, General Foods, IBM, U.S. Steel, Pittsburgh Plate Glass). Some 250 colleges jumped aboard, signed up 5,000 regular students, who pay an average $45 tuition and get from two to five hours of credit (depending on the college) if they pass their exams. The first-semester finals are due this week.

Cosmic Cooking. But Classroom quickly exceeded its strictly academic goal. The first network educational TV class of any kind, the show is already approaching the ratings of later-rising Dave Garroway's Today. Its 47-state audience now includes thousands of high school students, housewives, plumbers, executives, servicemen and even 500 San Quentin cons who happily find that physics does not a prison make. One 14-year-old boy on a Colorado ranch races forth before the show to catch it on his school TV set miles away. When the show conflicted with their devotions, the sisters in a Midwest convent switched their Mass time by special permission of the Mother House.

Part of Classroom's success lies in the country's post-Sputnik appetite for science. But the show could have been a nucleonic turkey without its M.C.: Dr. Harvey E. White, 57, a top University of California physicist, who got the $38,000 yearly job (v. $12,000 at U.C.) after previously enlivening a TV high school physics course in Pittsburgh. A lanky, friendly, precise talker, Dr. White is no jazzy showman ; he drones at times like a farm agent exhaling a market report. Yet he somehow makes physics a sort of cosmic cooking course that can fascinate anyone. White's secret is superb preparation: he spends twelve hours every day writing the script, building laboratory props and rehearsing with a 21-man crew. The preparation has to be right; a faulty wire can delay an entire day's lesson.

Nobel Flavor. Last week Classroom began expanding its faculty as well as its audience. Into White's continental ivory lab came the first of seven Nobel prizewinners, Bell Telephone Physicist Walter H. Brattain, for a flawless if slightly baffling discourse on transistors. The other Nobelmen in a second semester devoted to atomic physics: Columbia University's Dr. Polykarp Kusch (March 9), Caltech's Dr. Carl D. Anderson (May 6), Columbia's Dr. Isidor I. Rabi (May 15), Stanford's Dr. Felix Bloch (May 19), the University of California's chancellor, Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg (May 29), the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory's director, Dr. Edwin M. McMillan (June 4).

Physicist White is so sold on the advantages of TV teaching (mainly the viewer's illusion of being White's sole student) that he no longer misses the feedback of classroom questions. Says he, in an observation most classroom teachers would argue with: "Actually, most questions are asked by the dumber students."

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