Because my voice recorder malfunctioned 15 minutes into my Lecture on
Copernicus on 2007 October 9, I've added this recording of my Copernicus
lecture from Autumn Quarter 2006. It is the same basic material, but
since I generally improvise on a basic outline, there will be some
differences. Personally, I liked this year's lecture better, but this
will at l ... Show More
Oct 2007
Lecture 17: On the Shoulders of Giants: Isaac Newton and the Laws of Motion
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 t ... Show More
44m 47s
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