Part I. Before we knew what, we knew how...
	Day 1: Ancient technology What did ancient people know? How do we know what they knew?
	Day 2: Technology vs. science Knowledge is not 'Science.' What if you try something and it works, but later you find out that your explanation is totally, utterly wrong. Is it still OK for it to work?
	Day 3: Alchemy and Tradition Experiment is not 'Science.' What if you try some things, and they don't work, and you tell people that they did work. Is that science? Is it science if they work some of the time?
	Day 4: Galileo, Newton, Ussher Science vs scholarship. Is careful thinking and meticulous scholarship 'science'?	Bryson Chapter 4
Part 2: The Watershed	Before them, no science; after them, science. Seeing the old with new eyes changed our power over the world around us.
	Day 5: The Lavoisiers to Faraday and William Cobbett vs T.R. Malthus The preeminence of data over desire... How do we distinguish what we want to be true from what is, in fact, true?	Bryson Chapter 7
	Day 6: Poets and Artists of science In the 1600s and 1700s the great poets and artists were often scientists, and vice versa. That doesn't happen much any more. Byron, the Wordsworths, the Shelleys, and Coleridge: The great division between Art and Science: What was lost?
	Day 7: The practical engineers George Stephenson, Darby and Watt, Corliss and Zachariah Allen of RI turn theory into action...
	Day 8: Who may think? Mary Anning, Ada Lovelace, Rachel Carson: What if you anticipate the beginning of some great thread of knowledge, and no one pays attention....
	Day 9: James Hutton and John Snow Confronting tradition: thinking trumps non-thinking.	Bryson Chapter 20
	Day 10: Linne, Dalton, Mendeleyev: Do you have to understand something, in order to organize it and make it work?	Bryson Chapter 23,
	Day 11: Darwin: For good or ill - modern thought finds a new foundation....	Bryson Chapter 5, Chapter 25
Seeing the Unseeable	Things that Could NOT have been seen or known before science.
	Day 12: Bunuel to Marconi: "How the World was One."	Arthur Clarke How the World Was One 1995
	Day 13: Wegener and Hess: ...the unchanging earth.	Bryson Chapter 12
	Day 14: Percival Lowell Immanuel Velikovsky and Carl Sagan Last gasps of a romantic.	I. Velikovsky Worlds in Collision 1950 Carl Sagan Broca's Brain 1974
	Day 15: Einstein: "The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we CAN imagine." (A.S.Eddington)	Bryson Chapter 8
	Day 17 Science Fiction, or... This image is not a dreamscape. It is believed to be the first photographic image ever taken by Joseph Niepce, the inventor of photography, in 1826. Interesting that it is almost surrealistic, eh? At first photography dramatically improved our ability to capture reality,but soon it became possible to manipulate photographic images to produce entertaining, and then fraudulent images. Recent advances in computer graphics have taken this to the ultimate limit... totally fantastic images that cannot be distinguished from 'real' pictures. We are used nowadays to sci-fi writers who imagine every possible kind of creature and culture. What makes something "Science" fiction? Can everything we imagine about the future come to pass? How do we know what is 'real' or 'science' after all?
Student Presentations
Final Exam

top row of images at the head of this page:

1. the artist's hand. This outline of an artist's hand was painted on the wall of a cave in France about 30,000 years ago. It's believed that the image was created by holding the hand against a wall and spraying paint by blowing it through a straw as modern artists do with an airbrush.

2. Eratosthenes of Cyrene. The third scholar to become librarian of the great Greek library at Alexandria in Egypt. About the year 300 B.C.E. he used an observation made by an Egyptian scholar in the south of Egypt to calculate the circumference of the Earth.

3. Aristotle

4. Galileo. His discussions and teachings regarding the Heliocentric system of the world brought him into conflict with the religious authorities.

5. The microscope constructed by the English experimentalist, Robert Hooke about 1650. Although Leuvenhoek and others preceded him, Hooke's superior microscope and greatly superior powers of observation and detailed recording of his sightings made him the most effective of the early microscopists. He was the first to describe the concept of the biological cell.

6. Charles Darwin, the describer of Natural Selection, Father of modern biology, and accidentally the father of a whole series of bizarre twisted versions of his ideas misapplied to social constructs under the name of "Social Darwinism."

7. the Corliss Engine. Designed by an engineer in Providence, RI, it incorporated the last grat improvement in steam power during the great age of steam, and was the best steam engine in the world in about 1860.

second row

8. Karl Marx. Marx was a great admirer of Darwin - he even tried to dedicate his masterwork, Das Kapital, to Darwin. Marx, like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Francis Galton, T. R. Malthus and numerous other writers in the mid 19th century, was trying to make sense of the totally unprecedented social and economic conditions that had arisen in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

9. Albert Einstein. It is not an accident that we associate Einstein's name with the concept of genius. In one year he wrote a series of scientific papers on several distinct topics, each one of them with ideas so dramatically advanced that it took months for the experts to realize what he had done and be amazed by it. In particular Einstein's views on the nature of time, gravity and light were so bizarre that he himself said that they should not be taken seriously until there was real experimental proof. It took a few years, but each of his ideas, bizarre or not, was proven correct.

10. Harry Hammond Hess. A Professor at Princeton who served in WW II, Hess used the newly invented sonar equipment aboard his U.S. Navy vessel to chart the oceans, providing the data that was needed to prove Alfred Wegener's ideas correct.... but first he had to figure out what all those mountains of recordings meant.

11. Muslim Woman. The human race has made a big mistake. For thousands of years women have not been allowed to express their intellects, to discover and describe. This woman with her mouth covered is symbolic of the restricted role our cultures have allowed women. But now that many more roles are open to women, we can expect twice the advances that we could have achieved with men only. Right?

12. Astronaut sets foot on the lunar surface. By going to the moon and exploring our solar sysem, one thing that has become clear is that the "conquest" of Space is going to be very much harder and take very much longer and be very, very much more expensive than we thought. So, we need a lot of ideas to bring down the cost, and while we are considering the barren other worlds, we need to focus on taking care of the one world we know supports life - Earth.