Text Box: Popular Literature of Contemporary Science Professor Mark Shechner TTh 2:00 - 3:20 Reg. No. 404939 Text Box: 261

Text Box: “The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people.”--Stephen Jay Gould English 261 is not a science course. It is an English course, and you won't be doing any science. There is no lab; there will be no math. The professor from time to time may put some math on the board, but at no time will the students be asked to do the same. This is a course on science as literature, and we will be as much concerned with the way ideas from the realm of science are presented and articulated as with the actual findings of scientists and science writers. We'll be doing some things that are familiar to English majors and Gen Ed students from conventional classes: reading science as history, as culture, as drama, as writing, even as language. Words turn out to be important in science, too not just in literature, which is why I take pleasure in the writing of Stephen Jay Gould and Oliver Sacks. They bring to the natural world and their ways of discovering it phrases that are as vibrant and attractive as those of any novelist. Science turns out to be as much a story-telling medium as literature, and some of the stories are remarkably about the same things. Who are we? What is this life? What is the world we inhabit? The universe that stuns us with its immensity and distance? Where does it all come from and what are our own origins? Science and literature, along with religion, are routinely obsessed with the same big ologies: ontology, epistemology, originology. However, that doesn't mean that this is going to be a typical English course. Among the concepts that students will have to master are some very difficult ones. Relativity, in both of its forms, Special and General, is not easy, and students will have their hands full with some of the counter-intuitive concepts of modern physics. So, the course will shuttle back and forth between the continuities of scientific and humanistic thinking and the differences. We'll be working both sides of the street, and hopefully, students will learn to respect the differences, but to respect both sides of the difference equally. I won't be turning science entirely into literature, but neither will I attempt to frighten unwary humanists into thinking that they've fallen into a strange new universe governed solely by space-time unities, quantum mechanics, gravitational collapses, quarks, both charmed and strange, cosmic wormholes, and n-dimensional superstrings. We'll be talking a lot about plots and sequences and quarrels and reconciliations, which we sometimes call fissions and fusions. Organizational baseline: There are three modules in the course, plus one excursion outside of them. I. Foundations and Origins: space, time, and matter at both ends of the scale of size, from particle physics to cosmology. It will not pretend to deal with everything but only with "what is new," that is, cutting edge physics and cutting edge astronomy and cosmology: quarks to black holes.

Text Box: Much of this material is conceptually difficult even without math, but also quite fascinating. Students will be expected to come away with some appreciation for and knowledge of certain fundamental ideas: quantum mechanics and relativity, the eight-fold way in particle theory, general relativity and the space-time continuum, black holes and the origins of the universe in the "big bang." II. Evolution and Biology. This module will try to do for evolution and the origins and foundations of biology what the former module did for space, time, and matter. III. Human Evolution. The reading is more varied and unstructured than in the first two sections in large part because the state of knowledge is so much more fractured and lacking in system. Class Dynamics and Grading: Much of the course will be conducted by lecture. But to the extent that it can be done in a lecture hall, I will encourage students to speak up and to feel free to ask questions and discuss difficult concepts with the professor and each other. I plan to leave time at the end of every class for just discussion. After each module there will be a quiz and there will a comprehensive final exam at the end. Students should expect to be responsible for concepts only, not math. And since some of the lectures will not come directly from the books, I will ask questions about things I have said in class, even on matters that can't be found in the texts. There is also a writing component to the class, which I won't be too specific about until I see how many students are in the class and how many pages need to be read and graded.