The Universe: Startling Truths

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In the 20th century the scientific community transformed human understanding of the natural world. We now know that matter, space, and time follow rules that appear to contradict our everyday experience and in fact profoundly challenge our intuitive sense of physical reality. What are these revolutionary concepts, and how did they come to be accepted truths? We will start with the Theory of Relativity, which describes how motion and mass warp time and space, and how it sprang from Einstein’s genius, building on the careful experiments of a handful of scientists. Next we will look at some of the principles of Quantum Mechanics, with a particular focus on the description of a world where the outcome of a measurement is necessarily uncertain, and seek to understand how a small group of scientists worked collectively to come to these realizations. More recently, the scientific community has found that the Theory of Chaos introduces fundamental unpredictability of an entirely different origin. Finally, we will see how these ideas come together in our modern description of the Cosmos, including our detailed understanding of the origin of the Universe 14 Billion years ago, and realization that the stuff of our universe is mostly “dark”, invisible to our most powerful telescopes. Chaos Theory and our modern view of the Cosmos emerged from the collective work of a vast network of scientists, sharing ideas, fighting against uncertainty (and sometimes each other), and applying rigorous empirical tests to collectively determine how to most accurately describe how our world works, and therefore they provide examples of how the process of scientific discovery has changed over the course of the last century from a primarily individual pursuit to a fully communal endeavor.