Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity

To get a sense of spatial scales, let’s go on a journey through the solar system. We begin with the human scale, then widen the ...

Lecture 2: Moving across Multiple Scales Stellar scales take us to entirely new orders of magnitude. How long would it take to r ...

At ¿ rst sight, these huge scales may seem to deprive human history of any signi¿ cance. But we will see in the next lecture tha ...

Lecture 3: Simplicity and Complexity Simplicity and Complexity................................................................. ...

Over 13 billion years, the upper level of complexity appears to have increased. Intuitively, this is reasonably clear. The early ...

Lecture 3: Simplicity and Complexity from one level to another: from the top to the bottom of a waterfall, or from the boiler to ...

A simpler answer is that even if energy differentials are diminishing over the entire Universe, they may increase locally. For e ...

Lecture 3: Simplicity and Complexity What properties are shared by all complex entities? Does the idea that modern human societ ...

Evidence and the Nature of Science ................................................ LECTURE The second position we’ll describe a ...

Lecture 4: Evidence and the Nature of Science our trust in those who built it, maintained it, and À y it. Or we can decide to tr ...

distorted the past. They highlighted the activities of the literate and could say nothing about the history of the natural world ...

Lecture 4: Evidence and the Nature of Science at the University of Chicago, Willard Libby (1908–1980) developed practical ways o ...

Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology ................................ LECTURE As far as we know, all societies have asked t ...

Lecture 5: Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) used a new instrument, the telescope, to show t ...

distance to your ¿ nger using basic trigonometry. The same principle applies to stars, for as the Earth orbits the Sun, the clos ...

Lecture 5: Threshold 1—Origins of Big Bang Cosmology Assuming that our part of the Universe was typical, Hubble’s discovery sugg ...

Why did it take so long for astronomers to take big bang cosmology seriously? What were the three most crucial steps in the cre ...

Lecture 6: How Did Everything Begin? How Did Everything Begin? .............................................................. LE ...

From about 10í^35 of a second after the moment of creation, we can tell a good scienti¿ c story. Something appeared. It was tiny ...

Lecture 6: How Did Everything Begin? planets) or because they are too small (such as the subatomic particles known as neutrinos) ...