“If we were to name the most powerful assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life, it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.”- Richard Feynman Without a "microscope", the existence of atoms is not evident. The brightest minds back in the day even conjectured that everything is made from... water, because it can be solid, liquid, and gas. Then, how did science figure out that atoms indeed exist?

What are the things we see in the sky—the sun, the stars, and the weird stars that “wander” about? Where are we in the universe? How big is the universe? What IS the universe? Human beings have been answering these questions for thousands of years with increasing precision, and now we (think that we) have a pretty good picture of what our universe looks like. In this class, we’ll learn about what we know, and moreover, how we know what we know. From ancient Greek astronomy to modern cosmology, we’ll put ourselves in the shoes of Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Hubble, and other great thinkers and discuss what they did—and didn’t—see in the universe.

Do you like crazy time travel movies? Have you ever listened to a character exposit about time travel for 10 minutes and thought "Huh I want to learn more about this"? Well then, this is the class for you. In this class, we are going to be talking about time-lines, time-loops, and paradoxes from some of our favorite stories. We'll talk about stories that make sense and stories that don't. It'll be a lot of fun! Warning: there are going to be spoilers for a lot of stuff. Here is a list of the spoiler warnings for those who care about that: Predestination, Avenger's Endgame, Terminator, Interstellar, Arrival, and Dark.

Time travel is everywhere in popular media, but ever wondered "is this stuff real?" In this class we are going to be talking about both the classic paradoxes and physical theory. Topics include special relativity, the many-worlds theory and general relativity.