The Einstein Revolution from Harvard

Last updated on August 9, 2022 6:13 am

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Introduction

The Einstein Revolution course traces Albert Einstein’s engagement with relativity, quantum mechanics, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, the arts, and technology.

About the Einstein Revolution course by Harvard

Albert Einstein has become the icon of modern science. Following his scientific, cultural, philosophical, and political trajectory, this course aims to track the changing role of physics in the 20th and 21st centuries. This history course addresses Einstein’s engagement with relativity, quantum mechanics, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, the arts, and technology, and raises basic questions about what it means to understand physics in its broader history.

Participants in the course will follow seventeen lessons, each of which will present a mix of science (no prerequisites!) and the broader, relevant cultural surround. Some weeks will examine the physics concepts, while others will see excerpts of films or discuss modernist poetry that took off from relativity. Or we might be looking at the philosophical roots and philosophical consequences of Einstein’s works. At other times we will be fully engaged with historical and political questions: the building, dropping, and proliferation of nuclear weapons, for example.

Typically, in a lesson (about an hour of streamed material), there will be opportunities for individual mini-essay writing, some multiple-choice questions to bolster your understanding of the science, and a group activity which might one week be a debate and another a collective commentary on elements of artwork from 1920s Weimar Germany.

What you will learn from this course on the Einstein Revolution?

• Through the life and work of Albert Einstein, the changing role of physics in the 20th and 21st centuries.
• Einstein’s engagement with relativity, quantum mechanics, Nazism, nuclear weapons, philosophy, the arts, and technology
• How to engage with questions about what it means to understand physics in its broader history.

Syllabus

 Lesson 1

•  Poincaré’s Maps

 Lesson 2

•  Einstein’s Clocks

 Lesson 3

•  Einstein’s Style

 Lesson 4

•  Space-Time

•  General Relativity

 Lesson 5

•  The Assassin of Relativity

•  The Art of Relativity

 Lesson 6

•  The Philosophy of Relativity

•  Cosmology

 Lesson 7

•  Fission, Women in Physics and the Rise of the Nazis

•  The Nazi Bomb and Los Alamos

•  Nuclear Bibliography and Readings

 Lesson 8

•  Nuclear Proliferation

•  Quantum Debates

 Lesson 9

•  Quantum Philosophy

•  Quantum Technology

 Lesson 10

•  Einstein, Politics and Religion

 Lesson 11

• Conclusion

 Primers

• Algebra Primer

• Physics Primer

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