In the first meeting, we will discuss the general idea of the course and cover some housekeeping items.
The first part of the course will discuss how Physics (and many other sciences) have constructed a modern sythesis somewhat analogous to the medieval idea of the the Great Chain of Being. This organization spans the widest possible range of scales, something like the old movie called Powers of Ten. [See also here, and pop cultural versions here, and here].
It is interesting to note that this movie, which was released in 1966, covers a range of scales much smaller than we think are relevant today. At the outer limit, the size of the observable universe, is now thought to be many hundreds of times larger than in the movie, at least. How much larger is a complicated question, since the universe has expanded considerably since the light was emitted by the farthest objects we can see with telescopes. And even then, there are probably even larger parts of the universe over the horizon (whose light has not had time to reach us since the Big Bang). On the other end of the scale, the movie stops at the size of the quarks inside of a proton --- whose existence was still tentative in 1966. Today, quarks and the consitution of protons is well established and the size limit extends much much smaller than quarks. String theory, a much debated tentative theory of the ultimate structure of matter, posits objects on the Planck scale, which is 19 powers of 10 smaller than reached in the movie. A string is much much smaller compared to a proton than a proton is to a person. The movie would have to be more than twice as long to reach this whole range, even doing every decade in 10 seconds. Long stretches of the movie would be very boring (or even more boring than they already are).
Class notes from the tablet are posted here.