Skills you'll gain

Specialization - 3 course series

Learners are invited to reflect on the ideas and evidence presented in lectures and readings through course discussions and individual writing prompts. Additionally, learners are prompted to discuss their learning journey with friends or family members as a means of reflection and synthesis.

You will learn how Galileo's findings with the telescope challenged the Aristotelian interpretation of the cosmos, about Galileo’s revolutionary conclusions on gravity, and Newton's universal law of gravitation. This course will also introduce you to the scientific methods and their limitations. You will also explore the properties and behaviors of homemade pendulums. Next, you will explore modern ideas of cosmology, of the Big Bang, and even recent speculations that our universe is not all there is. Mysteries and properties of light and how they were discovered, questioned, and confirmed through experiments over the past few hundred years through the present will also be discussed.

You will be introduced to some of the current understandings of matter and subatomic particles and also take a trip to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN! Finally, you will explore quantum mechanics' interpretation of reality and compare quantum versus classical boundaries. This course also addresses questions such as: Where do you draw the line between the quantum and the classical worlds? What do we mean by “knowable” and “unknowable”?

You will learn about logic, computers, simulations, and different perspectives on the nature of human consciousness. You will also be able to determine what free will means to you and your reality. Next, you will learn the features of artificial intelligence and understand if it is possible to mimic the complexity of a brain through a machine.

Question Reality: Matter

Question Reality: Mind