ESP Biography



SHI-FAN CHEN, ESP Teacher




Major: 8

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: 2017

Picture of Shi-Fan Chen

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Not Available.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

S9501: Heliocentrism Sounds So Passé: An Introduction to Cosmology in HSSP Summer 2015 (Jul. 12, 2015)
Alright, so you already know that the sun is not at the center of the universe, and perhaps even that there was never a center in the first place. But why is the night sky dark? How do galaxies form? How old is the universe, and what is it made of? What does it mean if space is curved? What if all you needed for a first stab at these questions was Newtonian mechanics? In this course we will attempt to answer all these questions and, if time allows, come up with some more. Along the way we will develop quantitatively precise descriptions of spacetime and its expansion, learn about the evidence for dark matter and dark energy, think about what the cosmic microwave background tells us, and even calculate how long we have before our galaxy collides with the Andromeda galaxy. The sky’s the limit.