Official description

The Physics of time travel, teleportation, levitation, invisibility, special effects, and other physics related topics found in literature, film, and gaming.  The course will analyze the realism of physical phenomena in these media, and consider the impact of these concepts on science and society.

( PHY202H1 is primarily intended as a Breadth Requirement course for students in the Humanities and Social Sciences with no university-level background in physics. Any student with university-level credit in physics, including students with secondary school transfer credits in physics is ineligible to take this course).

Additional information

In this course, we are going to train our scientific literacy and learn qualitative but serious modern physics concepts through the lens of science fiction in a variety of media formats. Black holes, wormholes, teleportation, time travel, quantum mechanics, interstellar travel, how stars and galaxies actually work, and many more concepts will all be fair game, and will be introduced by a several different science fiction texts that we will discuss in class and use as springboards to discuss the underlying physics. 

For students, the course will involve watching/reading approximately 6 different assigned science fiction texts (focusing on movies, short stories, episodes of TV shows, but related  concepts in video games or gaming spin-offs may also be discussed) ahead of certain lectures, participating in class and tutorial discussions, completing some assigned popular-science readings to learn some physics concepts in more detail, and conducting independent research on some in-depth questions. 

Class watch parties and book clubs are encouraged.

NOTE: WE WILL USE THE Dec 8 MAKEUP LECTURE DAY FOR MID-TERM 3 (to make up for missed Monday Oct 12 lecture due to Thanksgiving)

NOTE: Students must watch the 2014 movie “Interstellar” prior to the first lecture.