I. Introduction and Background
Week 1: Introduction and Course Logistics
- Session 1: Introductory Lecture
Week 2: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy
- Session 2: Faraday, Thomson, and Maxwell: Lines of Force in the Ether
Week 3: Electromagnetic Waves and the Ether
- Session 3: Worldviews, Wranglers, and the Making of Theoretical Physicists
- Session 4: Waves in the Ether
II. Einstein: Relativity, Quanta, and the Philosopher-Scientist
Week 4: Philosophy, Experiment, and Special Relativity
- Session 5: Einstein and Experiment
- Session 6: Reception of Special Relativity
Week 5: From Relativity to Quantum Theory
- Session 7: A Political History of Gravity
- Session 8: Rethinking Light
Key Date: Paper 1 (4–5 pp.) due at end of week 5
Week 6: Early Stirrings of Quantum Theory
- Session 9: Rethinking Matter
- Session 10: Matrices and Uncertainty
Week 7: Emergence of Quantum Mechanics
- Session 11: Waves and Probabilities
- Session 12: Quantum Weirdness: Schrödinger’s Cat, EPR, and Bell’s Theorem
III. Oppenheimer: Physics, Physicists, and the State
Week 8: Physics and the State
- Session 13: Physics under Hitler
- Session 14: Radar and the Manhattan Project
Key Date: Paper 2 (6–7 pp.) due at end of week 8
Week 9: Wartime Projects
- Session 15: Film: The Day after Trinity
- Session 16: Secrecy and Security in the Nuclear Age
Week 10: Science, Secrecy, and Legacies of the Nuclear Age
- Session 17: Film: Containment
- Session 18: Cold War Classroom: Teaching Quantum Theory in Postwar American Physics
Week 11: Cold War and Counterculture
- Session 19: Counterculture and Science
Key Date: Paper 2 rewrite due at end of week 11
IV. Feynman and Postwar Theory
Week 12: Particles and Fields
- Session 20: The Conservative Revolution: QED and Renormalization
- Session 21: Teaching Feynman’s Tools: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics
Week 13: Thanksgiving break
Week 14: Standard Models
- Session 22: Quarks, QCD, and the Rise of the Standard Model
- Session 23: The Birth of Particle Cosmology
Week 15: Cosmology and Unification
- Session 24: The Big Bang, Cosmic Inflation, and the Latest Observations
- Session 25: String Theory and the Multiverse
Key Date: Paper 3 (10–12 pp.) due at end of week 15
