Standing Up in the Milky Way
Study Guide pages are provided by National Geographic, and contain Cosmos-related questions and activities for teachers and students studying the Cosmos series.
Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way
People (click to read about them at Wikipedia)
• Giordano Bruno proposed that the universe is infinite, that Earth is not its center, and that stars are distant suns, perhaps with other worlds circling them. His ideas did not go over well with religious authorities.
• Carl Sagan was a planetary astronomer, and a very successful popularizer of science. He was host and a producer of the TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), which inspired Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).
Ideas
• The nature of science: "What is Science?"
• The Cosmic Calendar—the history of the universe compressed into one year. To explore Tyson's Cosmic Calendar at your own pace, click HERE. Also see Cosmic Calendar at Wikipedia.
• Drawing comparisons and contrasts between scientific and religious thought: "Science, Religion, and Belief"
• Tyson often says, "To see this, we have to change scale." Click HERE to see what our Solar System would look like if scaled down to fit on a football field. Changing scale often helps to clarify very large and very small distances and times. Programs like Cosmos can help you to expand your understanding of scale in spacetime.
• Here's another take on making stellar distances more understandable. The distance from Earth to the sun is a common unit of distance for astronomy, and it's called an astronomical unit, or one AU. Turns out that a light year is 63,000 AU, and just by coincidence, a mile is 63,000 inches. So if Earth were one inch from the sun, a light year would be one mile. Read more about the universe on this scale HERE.
So What's New?
• On some episode pages, this section will provide readings on subjects where significant discoveries have occurred since the release of Cosmos, a Spacetime Odyssey. For example, since the 2014 showing of this series, 1) gravity waves have been detected for the first time, and 2) the existence of the Higgs fundamental particle has been confirmed.
Readings
• One Culture: Science and the Humanities
Resources for anyone interested in connecting science and other areas of knowledge. Many of the materials here will be particularly useful in this course. Get to know your way around in One Culture.
• Poem: "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer", Walt Whitman:
Let this poem invite you to ask whether knowing more of what science says about nature adds to, or takes away from, its beauty. Good question for class discussion.
• Extra Poem: "Looking Up at Night", William Stafford:
After reading Stafford's poem, think about Tyson's discussion of the moon's formation and history in Episode 1. A scientist's ideas can turn out, based on experimental results, to be wrong—Ptolemy's model of planetary motion was wrong. But "Can a poem be wrong?"
People (click to read about them at Wikipedia)
• Giordano Bruno proposed that the universe is infinite, that Earth is not its center, and that stars are distant suns, perhaps with other worlds circling them. His ideas did not go over well with religious authorities.
• Carl Sagan was a planetary astronomer, and a very successful popularizer of science. He was host and a producer of the TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980), which inspired Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).
Ideas
• The nature of science: "What is Science?"
• The Cosmic Calendar—the history of the universe compressed into one year. To explore Tyson's Cosmic Calendar at your own pace, click HERE. Also see Cosmic Calendar at Wikipedia.
• Drawing comparisons and contrasts between scientific and religious thought: "Science, Religion, and Belief"
• Tyson often says, "To see this, we have to change scale." Click HERE to see what our Solar System would look like if scaled down to fit on a football field. Changing scale often helps to clarify very large and very small distances and times. Programs like Cosmos can help you to expand your understanding of scale in spacetime.
• Here's another take on making stellar distances more understandable. The distance from Earth to the sun is a common unit of distance for astronomy, and it's called an astronomical unit, or one AU. Turns out that a light year is 63,000 AU, and just by coincidence, a mile is 63,000 inches. So if Earth were one inch from the sun, a light year would be one mile. Read more about the universe on this scale HERE.
So What's New?
• On some episode pages, this section will provide readings on subjects where significant discoveries have occurred since the release of Cosmos, a Spacetime Odyssey. For example, since the 2014 showing of this series, 1) gravity waves have been detected for the first time, and 2) the existence of the Higgs fundamental particle has been confirmed.
Readings
• One Culture: Science and the Humanities
Resources for anyone interested in connecting science and other areas of knowledge. Many of the materials here will be particularly useful in this course. Get to know your way around in One Culture.
• Poem: "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer", Walt Whitman:
Let this poem invite you to ask whether knowing more of what science says about nature adds to, or takes away from, its beauty. Good question for class discussion.
• Extra Poem: "Looking Up at Night", William Stafford:
After reading Stafford's poem, think about Tyson's discussion of the moon's formation and history in Episode 1. A scientist's ideas can turn out, based on experimental results, to be wrong—Ptolemy's model of planetary motion was wrong. But "Can a poem be wrong?"
