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Of
all creatures inhabiting the earth, human
beings are the only ones who are curious
about what lies beyond their immediate
environment. Only they are concerned with
time and space, with what will happen
after they are gone.
This
two-semester course is a study of the
invention of these uniquely human
concerns. It describes how time and space
were invented to make sense of the world
and how this invention evolved from the
perceptions of primitive life forms to
become the complex, sophisticated ideas of
space and time that appear in contemporary
cosmology and quantum physics, and in art
and music throughout the ages.
We
will reconstruct the evolutionary,
biological journey that prepared our brain
to perceive and organize the world in
terms of space and time. Human history
reveals the road from the space and time
of mythologies to that of Aristotle,
Chaucer, Dante, Newton and Einstein, and
to the inflationary universe of present
cosmology. Particular attention will be
paid to the "flat" and "curved" spacetime
of Einstein's special and general
relativity.
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