THE MILKY WAY
Schedule of Lectures
- Introduction: scientific method and what it is all about
- Ancient Greeks and the beginning of science
- Aristotle: a very famous Greek philosopher
- Heliocentrism ahead of time: a story about how being clever does not always pay off
- Ptolemy: he finished what Aristotle had begun
- The discovery of the Earth
- Copernicus and his world system
- Tycho Brahe: a politically incorrect hymn to heavy drinking
- Kepler, his laws of planetary motion, and his idiosyncrasies
- Galileo: a story of vain, arrogance, punishment, and triumph
- Newton: the "father of modern science"
- Inertia and force
- Newton's third law
- Law of gravity, and whether Newton was struck by an apple
- Inertial and gravitational mass
- Inertial forces: are they real?
- The multiple faces of energy
- The age of the Earth: how the first guess was made.
- Lord Kelvin, Dr. Helmholtz, and their time
- How Rutherford saved Darwin
- Reminder: particle physics, atoms, nuclear reactions
- Radiometric dating (and how it is different from dating in general)
- A plumb line to the sun
- Discovery of Uranus: Flamsteed, Lemmonier, Herschel
- A power of math: discovery of Neptune
- A fallen planet: Pluto, and the rest of them...
- Return of Planet IX
- Comets and asteroids: when is the next Armageddon?
Movies from the lecture:
- Kant & Lambert: another example of being born too early
- Herschel & Kapteyn: how they mapped the whole universe, and why they did it wrong
- "Galaxigraphy": our galactic neighborhood
- Atoms and light
- Alchemy come true
- How stars shine
- Stars come in different shapes and sizes (well, perhaps not shapes)
- Main sequence: the lifeline of astronomy
- A life cycle of a star
- Stellar cinders: white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes
- Exiting with the boom: core collapse supernovae
- Angular momentum and why it is important for figure skating
- Fight for equality: thermonuclear supernova
- Discovery of the external universe
- Doppler effect: a good use for a police radar gun
- Curtis-Shapley debate
- Hubble and his law
- Cosmic distance ladder
- The disk, the bulge, and the halo
- Stellar populations
- Zwicky and the story of the Dark Matter
- Andromeda galaxy: a big sister
- Retinue for the queens
- What you are going to miss: a big splash
- Beyond the backyard
Movies from the lecture:
- Many faces of the intergalactic gas
- Cosmic dust: the astronomer's bane
- Galactic ecology
- Spiral arms: painting by starlight
Movies from the lecture:
- Beauty unsurpassed: star forming regions
- Pillars of creation: from dark clouds to bright stars
- Planets: a side product of star formation
- Search for extrasolar planets
Movies from the lecture:
- Galactic center
- Sag A*: a mini-super-massive black hole
- Black holes: rivers of space
- Why black holes are not black
Movies from the lecture:
- The world of galaxies
- Galaxy evolution in pictures
- Quasars and what powers them
Movies from the lecture: