Lecture Notes | Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th Century | Science, Technology, and Society | MIT OpenCourseWare

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Prof. David Kaiser

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Fall 2020

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Undergraduate

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Lecture Notes

Lectures 15 and 17 were film showings and there are no associated lecture notes.

Lecture 1: Introductory Lecture

Lecture 2: Faraday, Thomson, and Maxwell: Lines of Force in the Ether

Lecture 3: Worldviews, Wranglers, and the Making of Theoretical Physicists

Lecture 4: Waves in the Ether

Lecture 5: Einstein and Experiment

Lecture 6: Reception of Special Relativity

Lecture 7: A Political History of Gravity

Lecture 8: Rethinking Light

Lecture 9: Rethinking Matter

Lecture 10: Matrices and Uncertainty

Lecture 11: Waves and Probabilities

Lecture 12: Quantum Weirdness: Schrodinger's Cat, EPR, and Bell's Theorem

Lecture 13: Physics Under Hitler

Lecture 14: Radar and the Manhattan Project

Lecture 16: Secrecy and Security in the Nuclear Age

Lecture 18: Cold War Classroom: Teaching Quantum Theory in Postwar American Physics

Lecture 19: Counterculture and Science

Lecture 20: The Conservative Revolution: QED and Renormalization

Lecture 21: Teaching Feynman's Tools: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics

Lecture 22: Quarks, QCD, and the Rise of the Standard Model

Lecture 23: The Birth of Particle Cosmology

Lecture 24: The Big Bang, Cosmic Inflation, and the Latest Observations

Lecture 25: String Theory and the Multiverse

Course Info

Instructor

Prof. David Kaiser

Departments

As Taught In

Fall 2020

Level

Undergraduate

Topics

Learning Resource Types

Lecture Notes

Lecture Videos

Podcasts

Readings

Written Assignments

Download Course

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