Professor Yun - Spring 2008

COURSE OVERVIEW

This course will lead you on the longest and farthest journey possible. You will travel through the known Universe - exploring its myriad of wonders - and back in time to only moments after the Big Bang. There are two principal course goals which will be addressed throughout the semester:

You will become familiar with (and conversant about) the fundamental constituents of the Universe (Galaxies, Stars, Gas, Dust, Particles, and Radiation); and
You will develop an understanding (and, hopefully, an appreciation) of how science works and how we know what we know.

Along the way, you'll learn about the Fundamental Forces of Physics that describe virtually everything in the physical Universe. You'll learn about light - both how it's generated and how we interpret what we see. And through your efforts you will learn to view the sky (and the rest of the world!) in a new way. With luck, you will come to appreciate the tremendous beauty of the natural world.

The course is organized into four sections:

Naked-Eye Astronomy: You probably know more than you think
Tools of Astronomy: The Physics of Light; fundamental forces
Stars: Their birth, life, and death
Galaxies and Cosmology: The Origin and Fate of the Universe

For more details, look at the Syllabus

Format

This is not a course on the memorization of facts and recipes.

We have Google for that. This course will be an interactive exploration of the concepts which govern our understanding of our home - the Universe. Through course readings, homework, projects, and lively and active discussions each week (see Requirements for more details) you will build, with the help of your classmates, a foundation of knowledge of astronomy and science as a discipline.

This class will not be a passive experience.

Class time will be made up of a series of small lectures wrapped around active discussions where we explore the concepts and techniques from the pre-class readings. As a result, both coming to class and doing the readings are essential elements for this course.

As an active student, I also expect you to ask questions both in class and during office hours; to visit the telescope on Orchard Hill and the planetarium at Amherst College; and in general to be limited only by your imagination and curiosity.

The Home Page for this class is at URL http://www.astro.umass.edu/~myun/teaching/a100/. Check there often for class reading assignments and other important notices.

Finally, all the "facts" you need to succeed in Astro100 are in your text. You are encouraged to bring it with you to class as a guide for the lecture and a framework for any additional notes you may wish to take. Be advised that you will be accountable for all material assigned in the text whether or not it is covered in class. You are also accountable for all material covered in class - whether or not it is in the text.

Assignments and projects will involve the use of high school algebra.

I'm not a science major. Why should I care?

As much as this is a course on Astronomy, this is a course on how scientists think; how they make measurements, how they solve problems, and how they come to grips with the truly exotic. This is your opportunity to learn some of the techniques of scientific reasoning. Remember, the study of Astronomy - this course - covers larger topics -- measured by mass, size, and age -- than any other class you will ever take. This is good. These concepts, while exotic, are actually not hard to grasp once you have the tools to approach them.

Even if understanding how to think like a scientist doesn't interest you, you can not escape science in today's world. Like it or not, you are now living in a complex, modern society where science plays an ever-increasing role. It is crucial that you understand how science and scientists actually work, since you will find yourself voting on, reading newspaper articles about, and probably using the products of scientific research every day for the rest of your life. Perhaps this course will spark a life-long interest in science; perhaps not. In any event, the thought processes and reasoning skills you develop this semester should stand you in good stead in situations far surpassing this single undergraduate 3-credit course.

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