The class will meet at 3:10pm on Mondays and Wednesday in room MP202. For the additional seminar schedule, see the seminars page.
The schedule below will fill in the topics for the lectures, as they develop, and also some important dates. Class notes, useful links and other details will be posted on the notes pages.
- Sept 12: Lecture 1: Introductory remarks.
- Sept 14: Lecture 2: Reductionism vs. emergence.
- Sept 19: Seminars begin this week. Lecture 3: The great chain of Being as a chain of scales.
- Sept 21: Lecture 4: Greek atomists and the Whig Histroy of Physics. Newtonian gravity.
- Sept 26: Lecture 5: Newton's paradigm. Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. First writing assignment handed out
- Sept 28: Lecture 6: Guest Lecture by Vatche Deyirmenjian. Quantum mechanics.
- Oct 3: Lecture 7: The fundamental forces, the Rutherford experiment and particle accelerators.
- Oct 5: Lecture 8: The strong and the weak force: quarks and hadrons.
- Oct 10: No Monday class, Thanksgiving Day.
- Oct 12: Lecture 9: Symmetry and symmetry breaking, antimatter.
- Oct 17: Lecture 10: Emergence in the standard model. First writing assignment due
- Oct 19: Midterm test in class
- Oct 24: Lecture 11: General relativity.
- Oct 26: Lecture 12: The hot big bang.
- Oct 31: Lecture 13: Some general features of emergence.
- Nov 2: Lecture 14: Introduction to chaos.
- Nov 7: No Monday class, fall break. No seminars this week.
- Nov 9: Lecture 15: Fractals in the Logistic Map, the Mandelbrot set.
- Nov 14: Lecture 16: Some more physical chaotic systems.
- Nov 16: Lecture 17: Second writing assignment handed out. The arrow of time and the origin of irreversibility.
- Nov 21: Lecture 18: Guest lecture by Vatche Deyirmenjian. Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
- Nov 23: Lecture 19: Open and closed systems. Entropy in the Universe.
- Nov 28: Lecture 20: Phases and phase transitions, critical points and bifurcations.
- Nov 30: Lecture 21: Non-equilibrium pattern formation, stability vs optimality. Second writing assignment due.
- Dec 5: Lecture 22: Power laws and self-organized critcality. No seminars this week.
- Dec 7: Lecture 23: Life itself. The End. What has emerged?
- 2 hour exam Thursday December 15th, 2pm in ES1050.