Lecture Description
Professor Bailyn talks about student responses for a paper assignment on the controversy over Pluto. The central question is whether the popular debate is indeed a "scientific controversy." A number of scientific "fables" are discussed and a moral is associated with each: the demotion of Pluto (moral: science can be affected by culture); the discovery of 51 Peg b (morals: expect the unexpected, and look at your data); the disproof of pulsation as explanation for the Velocity Curves (moral: sometimes science works like science).
Course Index
- Introduction
- Planetary Orbits
- Our Solar System and the Pluto Problem
- Discovering Exoplanets: Hot Jupiters
- Planetary Transits
- Microlensing, Astrometry and Other Methods
- Direct Imaging of Exoplanets
- Introduction to Black Holes
- Special and General Relativity
- Tests of Relativity
- Special and General Relativity (cont.)
- Stellar Mass Black Holes
- Stellar Mass Black Holes (cont.)
- Pulsars
- Supermassive Black Holes
- Hubble's Law and the Big Bang
- Hubble's Law and the Big Bang (cont.)
- Hubble's Law and the Big Bang (cont.)
- Omega and the End of the Universe
- Omega and the End of the Universe
- Dark Matter
- Dark Energy and the Accelerating Universe and the Big Rip
- Supernovae
- Other Constraints: The Cosmic Microwave Background
- The Multiverse and Theories of Everything
Course Description
In this course, Yale Prof. Charles Bailyn focuses on three particularly interesting areas of astronomy that are advancing very rapidly: Extra-Solar Planets, Black Holes, and Dark Energy. Particular attention is paid to current projects that promise to improve our understanding significantly over the next few years. The course explores not just what is known, but what is currently not known, and how astronomers are going about trying to find out.
This Yale College course, taught on campus twice per week for 50 minutes, was recorded for Open Yale Courses in Spring 2007.