Copernicus, Kepler, Tycho, and Galileo together gave us a new way of
looking at the motions in the heavens, but they could not explain why
the planets move they way the do. It was to be the work of Isaac Newton
who was to sweep away the last vestiges of the Aristotelian view of the
world and replace it with with a new, vastly more powerful predictive
synthe ... Show More
Mar 2006
Lecture 44: Life, the Universe, and Everything (Life Part II)
How can we search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and what are we looking for? This second part of a 2-part lecture picks up where we left off yesterday by examining SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence, and reviews what we might look for and how. We will use thi ... Show More
45m 56s
Sep 2006
Lecture 2: Astronomical Numbers
Before we can begin our exploration of astronomy, we need to develop a
common language for notating large numbers, and introduce the basic
units of length, mass, and time that we will use throughout the quarter.
We will first re-introduce the basic metric system, explaining how t ... Show More
43m 29s