Online Class: Cosmology 101

Course Lessons

• Lesson 1: Discovering the Early Universe

  Cosmologists work to understand how the Universe originally came into being, why it looks as it does now, and what the future holds.

• Lesson 2: The Origins and Early Days of Exploration

  With time to observe the heavens, early humanity did come up with some very elaborate, somewhat bizarre, and sometimes even gruesome explanations for why the night sky looks as it does.

• Lesson 3: Shape of Our Universe & Introduction to Stars

  Ancient Greeks were fascinated by the perfection of the circle and logically held the belief that the planets moved in perfect circular patterns.

• Lesson 4: Cosmology isn't Theology or Science Fiction

  Cosmology is a Science and science is all about making testable predictions.

• Lesson 5: Off With A Bang

  In this lesson we will attempt to address certain elementary questions regarding our being and our surroundings.

• Lesson 6: Building Our Own Universe

  The weirdest thing of all about our Universe is that everything in it contains the same basic materials! Or so Scientists believed for centuries.

• Lesson 7: Natural Forces and The Role They Play

  What is meant when scientists refer to a 'force?' They have classified every single force in the Universe into one of four groups: electromagnetic, gravity, strong and (the opposite) weak.

• Lesson 8: In the Dark

  The first astronomers were interested in the ocular properties of light, such as how light focuses as it passes through lenses,how it bends and splits through prisms and how it is reflected by things such as mirrors.

• Lesson 9: Is the Universe Really Just a Big Chemistry Set?

  All the "stuff" in this universe contains a large variety of interesting bits and pieces. At a sub-microscopic level, ALL this stuff is made up of combinations of various types of atoms – otherwise called ‘chemical elements'.

• Lesson 10: Making Stars, Solar Systems, and Galaxies

  It was some hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, that the hydrogen and helium which had formed in the early Universe began to aggregate under the pull of gravity.

• Lesson 11: Time Travel

  Sometimes the more we read and study the less we understand, especially when it comes to something like Time. Questions abound not only about time, but space time and the possibility of time travel.

• Lesson 12: The Greats & What They Have Done for Our Understanding of the Universe

  Just 5 of the great men who have contributed so much to our understanding of the Universe are listed in this lesson; but there are so many more that we could add to this but room (and time) prevents us.

• Lesson 13: The Greatest Cosmological Advances

  While it is true that improved human understanding of the origins of the Universe is derived from many different sources there are certain scientific institutions who have influenced Cosmology the most.

• Lesson 14: The End

  We need to keep in mind that although scientists may very well come up with what sounds, to us, like concepts of what is going to happen in the future - that their thoughts are only 'theories' and not 'certainties.'