Perhaps not as obvious as it seems. Art and Science both have similarities and important differences. Both have tools. Both require perception and imagination.

required

SU: C1

optional

PW: Learning to Look, Taylor, C 1&2 (this presumes that you have two renaissance paintings in front of you: Pietro Perugino, The Crucifixion with Saints and what Crivelli, Crucifixion

How do we know what we know? What is scientific knowledge? What are the elements of deductive and inductive reasoning? Is there a logic of scientific discovery? Is, in fact, science objective?

required

PW: from The Two Cultures, Snow survey

PW: Okasha, C 2&3

optional

PW: Thompson C 2&3

History and Art of the times

The Greeks started it all–science and art. When they were not fighting, which was not very often, they were digging into new intellectual regions. They essentially invented western philosophy, the western tradition in plastic representational arts, reasoning, and science.

Start Presocratics...

required

PW: from The Two Cultures, Snow

PW: Okasha, C 2&3

optional

The Early Greeks, the Presocratics

The first thinkers were from Turkey - Ionia - and while they did no recognizable science, they asked all of the questions that are important today.

Start Plato and Aristotle...

required

HW: C 1&2

SW: P1, C1-3

optional

WWW: Ionian Thinkers , by C.D.C. Reeve survey

WWW: Stanford Encyclopedia of Phil. survey

projects

...and Plato and Aristotle, cont, Astronomy and the Middle Ages

Platonic? or Aristotelian? Characterizations which track physicists to this day. Of course, through the Middle Ages fans of Plato gave way to fans of Aristotle, but we'll find characteristics of both which will fit modern physics.

Their hold on the next millenium was absolute: first Plato, following Augustus, then Aristotle, following Thomas Aquinas.

required

HW: C3&4

SW: P1, C4&5

SW: P2, C1-3 survey

optional

WWW: Plato background

HW: C5&6 background

Aristotle's Metaphysics from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy background

projects

History and Art of the times: The Beginnings of Imitative Representation

The Renaissance...not any old renaissance, but The Renaissance. Of what? There are various epochs in western history where there are clear demarcations between "modern" times and a less modern, less sophisticated time of before. The gold standard of revolution is The Renaissance. Here, the individual becomes important and Art begins its prominent role again as a barameter of the Times. Now, there was a first wakeup call in the 13th century, to be followed with the snooze alarm setting–the Real Renaissance–for the 15th century. Science figures in, but with a break. Art continues largely undiminished.

required

continuation of the Aristotle material from the last class.

optional

Art of Giotto from the Web Gallery of Art background

Byzantine Art in Italy (from Metropolitan Museum) background

Medieval Science and Copernicus

The science of the period struggled and only slowly formed, clinging in many ways to the past. But here we encounter the first modern scientific heroes and a pattern for being scientific begins to take shape with Copernicus.

required

SW: P3, C1&2

HW: C7 survey

HW: C8

SU: C2, SA-D

optional

Tycho and Kepler - the Intense Brothers

If it was a movie, you wouldn't believe it. Tycho and Kepler are the original Odd Couple, both needing the other, neither able to abide the other. Their collaboration and their battles are legendary and Kepler's tortured wrestling with Tycho's data form a Revolution that out does the Copernican revolution as a total break with the past.

Start Galileo...

required

SW: P4, C1-11 (this is long, but Great reading!)

SU: C2, SE&F

optional

Galileo

The original Bad Boy of science, unable to keep his mouth shut, unable to shun controversy, and unable to avoid inventing modern physics. He is nearly the first experimental physicist and the first to understand the implications of gravity and motion: he killed the Aristotelian mistakes and paid dearly for it.

Start Descartes...

required

HW: C9&10

SW: P5, C1-3

SU: C3, SA-C

optional

History and Art of the times; Newton and the enlightenment

A new revolution was coming - both in thought and in science and it was the British who led the way, followed by the encyclopedists and philosophes in France. Art becomes almost romantic, evocative, and precise. Physics becomes entirely predictable and Reason is the tool that was championed.

The methods and ideas of Galileo and Kepler were backed up by the mathematics and concepts of Descartes and the experimental manner of Boyle. The recipient of all of this new thinking was Isaac Newton, just the right person to synthasize it all in to a precise system.

required

HW: C11

SU: C3, SD-E

EP: P1, S1-5

optional

Newton, cont.

You couldn't invent this man in fiction–he could only be real flesh and blood. A recluse, elusive, pathologically touchy, temperamental, vindictive to extreme in the scientific part of his life; toast of the town, incorruptible government leader in the later years of his life. He unlocked the secrets of the Universe and his ideas and tools literally changed the whole world...making it usable and understandable.

Begin energy...

required

HW: C12

6P: C5

optional

Heat, Energy, and Waves

Spies, secrets, suicides, and accusations of plagiarism. All part and parcel of the development of our modern understanding of energy and heat. Still a difficult subject to narrow down, with a sort of "you'll know it when you see it" feel about Energy. Newton's techniques again come to the fore with a calculation that explains temperature, further convincing the Enlightened that all is Mechanical.

Finally, what is light? Newton's views strangled the opposition until Nature wins out.

required

SU: C4

SU: C5, SA-E

EP: P1, S6-10

EP: PII, S6-10

6P: C1

6P: C4

optional

reading3

reading4

Electrostatics and Faraday

In physics also, the apparent world gives way to a world that's not so apparent–one which is invisible to the passive eye and yet readily apparent to the intervening probe. The discovery of the lines of force due to electricity and magnetism and the underlying, totally new "substance" of the field sets the stage for the bowing out of the Newtonian view.

required

HW: C13

reading2

optional

History and Art of the times

The 19C was a time of huge social change, of course. Related to this was the emergence of a realism in art and literature which had a political tinge to it, but also evolved into a legitimate world-view that affected art and literature in fundamental ways. Realism begat a studied view which reached beyond just the surface and also brought the observer into play with the art of the times.

Start Maxwell...

required

optional

MIDTERM

required

optional

Electromagnetism - Maxwell

The mathematics of the Electromagnetic field was put into play by Maxwell...and a stunning, purely theoretical discovery was made. Light is electricity is magnetism - they are all one and the same thing, differing only in the details. Definitive testing of Maxwell's ideas was at hand by Hertz and Top 40 Hits on the radio followed naturally.

required

SU: C6, SA&B

EP: PII, S1-4

EP: PIII, S1-6

optional

Turn of the Century: ether, X-rays, electron, and radioactivity

During the last decade of the 19C, there was a clear superiority of opinion that Physics was nearing the end of its long successful run–nearing the end with Victory at hand. All was over, but the mopping up of measuring well-understood quantities just better and better. Counter to this optimism, was a creeping list of anomalies which began to show themselves as beyond mere annoyance, and beginning to suggest fundamental shakeup of the confident blustering of the Victorious. Everything that was understood was about to come crashing down.

But, Atomism, while a tool of the chemists, began to assert its place as part of the overall Confusion.

required

SU: C5, please skim SE-N

optional

Picasso's World

Insight into the heart of matter was not confined to the physicists. Following most fruitfully on the insight of Cezanne, Picasso and his band of bohemian Paris friends also discovered a reality below the surface of mere appearance. However, digging deeply uncovers structure and elements of art with a life of their own. The art of Picasso, Braque, and the extension to Kandinsky, Mondrian, Rothko, and Pollack is a result of taking appearance apart into its inner elements. Shunning the subject leaves...a whole new freedom.

required

reading1

reading2

optional

Electrostatics and Faraday; Einstein's World - Special Relativity

Did he? or didn't he? ...know of the Michelson-Morley experiment? Or did the Theory of Relativity come entirely out of his head. A dispute without a resolution. But, what Einstein knew was that the mathematics of Maxwell had a built-in lack of symmetry which needed fixing...or so the young patent clerk thought. Changed the world.

required

HW: C14 (up to "Princ. of Equivalence")

EP: PIII, S7-9

optional

An Equation for tee shirts

Eliminating a privileged position for observers, confounding classical physicists with the paradoxes of relativity could not match the real consequences of this theory: matter and energy are as indistinguishable as space and time. Everyone knows the formula, we'll understand the formula. Changed the world.

required

optional

The Quantum

Few were held in the esteem enjoyed by the quiet, formal, eminent Max Planck. One of the annoying puzzles was a seeming detail in the spectrum of color emitted by hot objects. Planck solved it minimally, but weirdly: Just as a piano is constructed to only play particular notes, so too, apparently, a warm body particular colors. Along comes Einstein, again, taking Planck's minimal idea to the Extreme by wrenching common sense out of physics and raising the specter of Newton's light corpuscles, without also banishing the opposite hypothesis. Changed the world.

required

HW: C15

SU: C7

EP: PIV, S1-4

6P: C2

6P: C6

optional

Quantum Mechanics

The deductive power of the new mathematics necessary to explain the quantum, leads to all manner of strange ideas: matter too, it seems, refuses to behave like proper substance, preferring the nether existence of both wave and particle.

required

HW: C16

EP: PIV, S1-4

optional

Dirac, Antimatter, and Surprises in Cosmic Rays

As a child he was forced to speak only French...so he learned to say little. But, as a physicist his imagination took off in a number of directions. When faced with reconciling relativity with the new quantum theory, he found an entirely new approach which predicted ridiculous results - until they turned up in experiments on cosmic rays. Today, antimatter is a thing of both science fiction as well as medicine and basic research.

required

reading1

reading2

optional

The Quark Model

"Three quarks for Muster Mark." Obscure James Joyce, overlooked, if ever looked at at all...but mere bedside reading for the multitalented Murray Gell-Mann. His frivolous naming of the elements making up a mathematical accounting scheme for describing the myriad of elementary particles masks a sophisticated mathematics. An elegant mathematical model? or, the way things are? Of course, experiment yielded the answer with a few stunning results which turned unbelievers into believers: the world is made from quarks.

Symmetry. Aesthetics. Order? Would you believe that the more disordered a system is, the more symmetric it is? The mathematics of symmetry is one of the most satisfying. Born on a dueling field during the last night alive of a rough-house 19 year old, symmetry evolved into a powerful tool capable of charcterizing the evolution of the universe. We'll explore some of the features of symmetry and the sometimes paradoxical features that it exhibits. Like: the nuclear world in a mirror is not the same as that world outside of a mirror.

required

HW: C17

SU: C8

optional

The Standard Model

"Standard Model." Suggests universal agreement, success. Certainly af ar cry from the little-noticed 3 page description of a model for combining two of the seemingly unlikely forces of nature into a single theory. Since 1967, however, the Standard Model has been tested hundreds of times, with not a single violation of any of its predictions. And yet, it's fatally sick and we know it. It's a matter of time - a few years - before its inherent deficiencies start to make themselves known as work in Illinois and Switzerland comes to fruition after many years of preparation.

required

reading1

reading2

optional

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity

So...if you fall from your roof, what do you experience? So asked Einstein of a house painter as he lay on the ground. The whole idea that accelerating and being pulled by gravity are indistinguishably the same thing led Einstein again off to a mind-bending set of ideas, from simple questions. Changed the world.

required

HW: C14 (starting at "Princ. of Equivalence")

EP: PIII, S10-14

optional

reading3

reading4

Accelerators and detectors

The microworld - that of the inside of the proton and the neutron - requires a re-creation of the environment of the big bang. How is this accomplished? Theoretically, on a computer? yes. But also in the hot interior of man-made collisions created in a few laboratories on earth and in collisions of cosmic rays with laboratories deep underground. The devices which create the beams and the detectors used to trap and identify the products of the collisions are the stuff of now scientific legend. MSU and many other universities are heavily involved in this work and we'll review our current and future international efforts.

required

optional

Cosmology- what do we know?

Star basketball player for the Big 10's University of Chicago. Lawyer, teacher and eventually cosmologist, before anyone knew that there was such a field. Edwin Hubble made a startling discovery: the universe is expanding. Not that we're moving relative to others, but that everything is expanding away from everything else. How can that be? Of course, when you've got Einstein on the case, a solution is at hand, although it may hurt your head. The idea that the universe has expanded from a tiny point - not that stuff expanded into the universe - but that the universe expanded is uncontroversial. How did it happen? Why is there a Sparty and not an anti-Sparty (more symmetry games). What, indeed, is a black hole and how prevalent are they?

required

HW: C18

reading2

optional

HW: C19

Cosmology - what don't we know?

You'd be surprised. Just when we think we know everything, that we can account for everything...along come surprises. This one's a humdinger: we don't know much at all. Most of the universe is missing and we don't know where it is, but we're looking. A good way to end a course on Navigation: We've lost the map and now we're building the roads as we go. But by now you know that that's the way science is!

required

reading1

reading2

optional