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Course Criteria
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This course will take you on a journey back in time, to the universe as it was when it was forming. Along the way we will make several stops in order to meet physicists and philosophers who were ahead of their time, guessing about the structure of the world in an unimaginable detail. They will tell us more about the tiniest bits of reality, elementary particles. Their interpretations made so many years ago do not differ a lot from modern knowledge. Modern physics of elementary particles deals with matter and antimatter. One of the things we will show is that the latter, as fictional as it may seem, really exists and its applications can be found in real-life situations.
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What is the origin of the Universe? Was there a beginning? What are we made of? For a long time, questions like these were only addressed within the realm of philosophy and religion. Tremendous advances in physics, astronomy and cosmology now enable us to address these topics in a scientific manner - based on reason, logic and experiment.
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Much is speculated and little is known of the strange life of Nikola Tesla. His inventions, that endowed the human race, are on the verge of being mystical and supernatural. Some of his major accomplishments include the invention of a rotational magnetic field that produces alternating current, transmission of electrical energy without wires, also known as Tesla effect, the invention of radio, magnifying ransmitter, co-invention of a radar and building the first alternating current power plant at Niagara Falls. Tesla\'s experiments were out of the ordinary, easily mistaken for magic.
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What would happen if I fell into a black hole? Can I travel back in time and change history? Is it possible to travel faster than light? This course is designed to provide an excellent introduction to modern physics and astrophysics by tackling all of the cool topics that are never covered in your average high school physics course.
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If the course's title interests you, it is very likely that you have considered the following sort of story and wondered how it ought to be evaluated: A young man is raised in a dangerous and depressing neighborhood. His education is certainly less than adequate. He has had no positive role models. Given this we are not at all surprised when he is arrested on suspicion of committing a violent crime. We may even think it is almost inevitable that he would commit crimes. How do we evaluate this case morally? If he was doomed from an early age, in what sense is he responsible? Is it fair to judge him as a bad person?
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Modern science throws light on many of the perennial questions of philosophy, sometimes seeming to confirm or refute old answers and sometimes suggesting new ones. Are sensory qualities, such as colors, in external things or only in our minds? Is the world governed by deterministic laws, and if so, what room is there for freedom of the will? Could space have extra dimensions? Could it obey geometrical laws other than the familiar ones of Euclid? Is time something that flows, or is the world a static four-dimensional manifold? Is time travel possible? Do the laws of classical logic break down at the level of quantum events? Is reality at the quantum level to any significant extent (as some have maintained) an observer-created reality? In this course we will explore these questions, using as food for thought both works of philosophy and elementary expositions of the two major theories of 20th-century physics, relativity theory and quantum mechanics.
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Things are not always what they seem. Take it with a grain of salt. Don't judge a book by its cover. Skepticism is not some esoteric intellectual enterprise, but rather it's very much a part of our common sense approach to life. Nonetheless, skepticism makes for a very slippery slope-a problem noted as far back in the ancient world. Skeptical arguments are useful when it comes to reevaluating one's faith in suspicious politicians or dubious ideologies, but are they so powerful as to defeat much of our putatively everyday knowledge? Our primary preoccupation in this class will be this very question.
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Based on Brown's most popular philosophy course, this course explores some of the central themes of existentialism. Existentialist philosophy is distinguished by its focus on issues of pressing concrete concern for the lives of individuals. The themes covered include: the nature of love (e.g., Is love a matter of passion or of commitment?); the ideal of authenticity (e.g., What does it mean to be oneself?); the critique of moral and religious beliefs (e.g., Is being moral always most important? Is believing on reasons always better than believing on faith?); and the problem of the meaning of life (e.g., What does it mean to say that life is meaningful? Does suffering have value?). Readings are drawn from existentialist thinkers, such as Kierkagaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Sartre, as well as from contemporary philosophers.
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What it is that makes us characteristically human has been a crucial question for a long time. In ancient Greece, 'featherless biped' was tried out as a definition, but a plucked chicken refuted that good idea. Since then a common suggestion has been that it's all about the mind. But what is the mind? This course will look at what we mean by words like mind, reason, intelligence, and consciousness. Is human intelligence different in kind to animal intelligence? If so, how? Could machines really think--or will they ever feel, or be conscious (have you ever met a "philosopher's zombie")? Would a conscious machine deserve human rights? Or maybe it's the other way around: what are fields such as psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science telling us about what it is to be human? "I think therefore I am", but does it have to be rational thought? And what happens when I fall asleep: maybe I'm a different person when I wake up again?
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Take a guided tour through works by some of the greatest thinkers of all time: Plato, Aristotle, Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and others.
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