UC Berkeley physics Professor Richard A. Muller finds himself suddenly popular in some surprising corners of the world.

It turns out self-starting students in 35 states and 43 countries have been watching the 90-minute "Physics for Future Presidents" talks he gives every Tuesday and Thursday morning to a packed lecture hall of 300 undergrads on campus. And the list is growing.

Under UC Berkeley's recent deal with Google Video to distribute university-produced course and event video and audio files, Muller's talks are available free and unedited, and come with his textbook and other course documents online.

The arrangement, begun in late September, highlights the Web's potential to extend higher learning to people who can't afford it or can't get to a campus -- and to places where UC-level teaching is nonexistent.

"I think we're onto something that could play a major role in the advancement of education in the world," Muller said.

Google distributes about 250 hours of university-produced material, including lectures for six courses. Videos of Cal lectures have been viewed about 400,000 times by Google users since September, said Obadiah Greenberg, Cal's Webcast product manager.

More than 50 institutions worldwide provide academic content online for free, according to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, whose Open Educational Resources Initiative helped pioneer the field five years ago.

"The idea is to bring high-quality academic content on the Web for people to use and reuse," said Catherine Casserly, a Hewlett education program officer. "It's the idea about knowledge being free to share for all."

Muller's lectures -- which are entertaining but demanding and are digestible to a wide audience because they're largely math-free -- are Berkeley's most popular Google-distributed videos. The one on atoms and heat that kicked off the course has been viewed more than 26,000 times and is on the verge of breaking into the list of the top 10,000 most-watched videos on Google.

Muller recently asked during a lecture to hear from students outside Berkeley.

"Today," wrote an e-mail correspondent who identified himself as a Tibetan boy studying math, "all day I spent watching physics lectures, wonderful lectures and (it's a) wonderful idea to share these with the rest of the world."

"It's better than getting a prize," said Muller. "It's the kind of reward you don't expect."

A naval officer stationed in Bahrain said he listens to Muller's podcasts while working out.

There were messages from Colombia, Slovakia and Poland. And a businessman based in Bamako, Mali, in West Africa, wrote: "At the end of this month I will be in Timbuktu and I assure you I will have your lecture playing on my MP3 player as I plod away from the city by camel."

"I really didn't think anybody from outside the university was going to be listening," said Muller, 62, who won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1982 and a Berkeley distinguished teaching award in 1999. A researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he has been a student, peer and mentor of some of the world's top physicists.

"I'm a deep believer that the way to world peace and economic progress is through education. Here, we're finding a way."

Muller insists students separate fact from pseudo-fact, testable reality from wishful thinking, and he gives them no way to cut corners.

"The whole idea is to get them thinking and not just accept everything they read," said Shawn Thorne, Muller's head graduate student instructor. "We're not dumbing down the material. The way he approaches it, this is stuff everyone should know."

Muller's trick is making physics easy to grasp, literally. An amateur magician, he encourages students to buy the toy magnets, lenses, rubber balls and Slinkys that captivated him when he was 10.

"He brings in real-life examples," said Sophie Bridgers, a 2006 Berkeley High graduate and first-year Cal student. "It's exciting for me to learn this because I've never taken physics before."

Muller reserves the opening 10 minutes of each lecture for students' questions -- "What's the easiest nuclear bomb to make?" "Can one get electrocuted from a swimming pool light?" "Why does bubble gum blow bigger bubbles than regular gum?" And he works with current events whenever he can.

North Korea's recent nuclear test provided a lesson in the physics of plutonium-fueled implosion bombs. They are extremely difficult weapons to set off -- "like squeezing a water balloon without having it leak out through your fingers" -- and the small size of the North Korean blast indicated it probably was a dud, Muller said.

"Learning is one of the great pleasures in life," Muller said. "If you don't believe me, tell a 10-year-old kid he can do one of two things: have as much chocolate as you want or learn to ride a bicycle."

The bicycle, he said, wins every time.

To listen online

Under a recent deal with Google Video, UC Berkeley is offering lectures and other academic content for free online. To hear physics Professor Richard A. Muller's lectures, visit www.muller.lbl.gov and click on "Physics for Future Presidents."