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For each episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, here are questions and ideas that might be worthy of further discussion.
If you class members see questions that you would like us to take up, please let me know. If you have your own questions, please email them to me. If there are episode segments you want to see again, I'll try to find them and show them.
I will devote our last meeting to this unfinished business. I will try particularly to take up questions and other requests I get from class members (in italics).
Also, before our final meeting, read these thoughts about connections between science and other forms of knowledge, and bring any comments or questions that this material raises in your mind.
Unfinished Business, by episode:
Episode 1, Standing Up in the Milky Way
• What is science?
• What are data, laws, and theories? How does each of these three forms of knowledge illuminate the nature of science?
• Does science progress linearly from data to laws to theories?
• What does interpreting literature or poetry have in common with doing science?
Episode 2, Some of the Things that Molecules Do
• How do scientists establish evolutionary relationships among organisms and construct evolutionary trees?
• How do scientists figure out the structures of molecules?
Episode 3, When Knowledge Conquered Fear
• This title has at least two meanings. What are they?
Episode 4, Hiding in the Light
• What can the different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum (radio waves, microwaves, IR, visible, UV, X-ray, gamma ray) tell us about the world around us -- things that we cannot detect with our senses?
• Some other forms of energy besides EM are referred to as "radiation." These include radioactivity, cosmic rays, and particles in the solar wind. How do these various forms of radiation differ from each other?
Episode 5 A Sky Full of Ghosts
• How have scientists measured the speed of light, from the first and simplest methods to the most precise and sophisticated? Read all about it HERE.
• Watch this video to see how to measure the speed of light using a microwave oven. (Really!) DO do this at home! I'll be happy to help you dispose of any remaining chocolate.
Episode 6, Deeper, Deeper Still
• What is photosynthesis?
• How do molecules capture light, convert its energy into chemical energy, and use that energy to make biological molecules like sugars?
• Biomolecular events occur at unimaginable speeds. Is it possible to learn intimate details of these processes? What might be the practical use of knowing?
Episode 7, The Clean Room
• Scientists like Pat Patterson measure the masses of atoms and molecules, as well as the exact quantities of atoms and molecules in a sample, using mass spectrometers. What is a mass spectrometer, and how does it work?
Episode 8, Sisters of the Sun
• How do you measure distances to stars? We can talk about the three simplest methods. If you want to know more, See Wikipedia: Cosmic Distance Ladder.
Episode 9, The Electric Boy
• Student Question: How does refraction happen?
• Refraction can be explained using nothing more than the change of speed when light goes into a different medium (say, from air to water). But how does the medium alter the speed of light?
• What is polarized light? How do certain materials rotate the plane of polarized light and what does that tell us about those materials?
• A glass brick from Faraday's "glass exile" period was the first thing he found that rotated plane-polarized light. Do you understand that experiment?
• Faraday suspected that his field explanations of electricity and magnetism might also be the explanation of gravity. Einstein took this idea and ran with it. He realized that if gravity is a field in spacetime, then there should be gravity waves. Over a century later, scientists detected gravity waves for the first time. Read more HERE.
Episode 10, The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth
• Heat drives continental drift by convection. What is convection?
• How does a seismograph work?
• How do scientists use seismographs to pinpoint the epicenter of an earthquake
Episode 11, The Immortals
• If you lived forever, would you still make a to-do list?
Episode 12, The World Set Free
• How do solar cells work? Our rooftop solar water heaters are simple, low-tech ways of collecting solar energy to unburden our water heaters. But solar cells capture solar energy directly in the form of electricity, which can power the whole household. The basis of this technology would have been impossible for early solar-energy proponents like Augustin Mouchot and Frank Shuman to understand. (But you could might be able to explain it to Michael Faraday.) Read HERE, and HERE.
• How do isotopes tell us whether carbon dioxide comes from volcanism or from automobile exhausts?
• What is a feedback loop?
Episode 13, Unafraid of the Dark
• What are gravitational waves and how are they detected? Recent detection of gravitational waves have further confirmed Einstein's view of the nature of spacetime as described in his general theory of relativity. (By the way, the term gravity waves refers to the much more mundane waves in water or air -- waves that result from the combined effects of wind and gravity.)
• Explain the markings on the cover The Voyager Golden Record. Wikipedia describes and explains the markings on the record cover, and the contents of the recording.
Episode 14, There is No Episode 14, but there is still unfinished business.
• Student Question: What is the Higgs boson, or Higgs particle? (What is a boson, anyway?) One of the most exciting recent findings about the cosmos is the detection of the elusive but long-predicted Higgs particle, which completes what is now the most traditional picture of fundamental objects that make up the universe. There is no episode of "Cosmos" that is the obvious place to talk about fundamental particles, including the Higgs. Here's what Wikipedia has to say. Wear your boots.
• Why is science facing a crisis today, even when other crises -- regarding energy, climate, emerging diseases, and more -- make a scientific approach more important than ever? Watch this video featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson.
*Image from Pixabay
