Block I: Dick Hilt, PC123, Scientific Revolutions I: The Copernican Revolution
Block II: Shane Burns, PC124, Scientific Revolutions II: Relativity
The course as a whole meets Critical Perspectives: The West in Time (2 units) or Scientific Investigation (SI.)
'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;/ All just supply, and
all Relation:/ Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,/ For every
man alone thinkes he hath got/ To be a Phoenix, and that there can bee/ None
of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.' —John Donne, “The First
Anniversary,” 1611
In 1543 Copernicus took the Earth from its central position in the world and
replaced it with the Sun. By 1611 Galileo had turned his telescope to the
heavens and found them as changeable and imperfect as the Earth. Because the
structure of the universe was intimately woven together with religion and
social structure, these changes in the physical world shook the foundations
of our relations with each other and with God. John Donne's poetic response
illustrates the disorientation of losing your place in the world. Just what
was the world in 1611, and how was it changing? We will read from Aristotle,
Copernicus, Galileo and Newton to sample the way thinkers have thought about
the heavens from the ancient Greeks to the 18th Century. The class will spend
the second week of block 1 at the Baca Campus.
Newton's mechanical universe, with its particles moving through a Euclidian
three-dimensional space, exerting forces on each other, and marking time with
a universal clock, dominated physical thought for more than two centuries.
However, early in the 20th century questions about the propagation of light
spurred Einstein to revise our ideas of space and time radically. In his theory,
moving clocks tick more slowly than stationary clocks, and moving objects
measure short, at least in their direction of motion. Even the sequence in
which events occur turns out often to be unsettled. If our instinct about
the flow of time is wrong, what does this do to our belief in cause and effect?
We will study the physics that drives these questions and then consider some
of the impact of physics on the culture of the last century or so.
A set of linked one-block courses that must be taken together,
with one instructor in each block; separate grades will be given for each
block.