FYS 1078 UNIVERSE BEYOND HUMAN SCALE

Our everyday experience gives us a certain intuition about how the Universe works.  But one of the fundamental surprises of modern physics is how at scales well-removed from the human — on very large or very small scales, or for objects moving at great speeds — things behave very differently than our intuition suggests.  In this course, we will examine the weird and wonderful properties of the Universe at scales different from our own.  Students will learn about three major physical theories developed in the 20th century:  special relativity, which describes the properties of objects moving near the speed of light; cosmology, which describes the origins and structure of the Universe; and quantum mechanics, which describes the behavior of objects on the scale of atoms and molecules.