Put Harvard researchers and world-class chefs together and what do you get? An unexpected combination and a course called Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter. During the past several decades, researchers have pushed the boundaries of soft matter science, a scientific field that looks at how thermal stresses and thermal fluctuations change the physical properties of everyday materials. Naturally this all applies to food and cooking. Hence the premise of the course which uses cooking to explain fundamental principles in applied physics and engineering.

You can watch the introductory lecture here and the third tasty lecture, The Many Faces of Chocolate, above. The full course can be watched on YouTube and iTunes. And, of course, we've added it to our collection, 1,500 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.

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via Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

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