Lecture Index

Some HTML files were created from Microsoft Word files by using "Save as HTML". No attempt was made to clean up the format, so there are some oddities, especially in the graphics and special formats. Several of the lectures, however, will be in postscript form.

• Lecture 1 (1/18) Overview; be prepared to be surprised.
  
• Lecture 2 (1/20) Spheres, Ferris Wheels, and Heresy.
  
• Lecture 3 (1/25) deBrache, Kepler, and Galileo: The Birth of Modern Cosmology.
  
• Lecture 4 (1/27) From Kepler to Newton. The meaning (and ambiguities) of Newton's laws
  
• Lecture 5 (2/1) Newtonian space and time
  
• Lecture 6 (2/3) Causation, determinism and all that
  
• The Gettier Problem - Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Edmund L. Gettier
  
• Lecture 7 (2/8) Conservation laws: The limits of the classical world Frankfurt Examples on Moral Responsibility and Determinism
  
• Lecture 8 (2/10) Waves Maxwell and Invariance
  
• Lecture 9 (2/15) Experiments leading to Special Relativity
  
• Lecture 10 (2/17) Special Relativity
  
• Lecture 11 (2/22) Energy-mass equivalence E=mc^2 derivation


• Lecture 12 (2/24) General Relativity Primer
  
• Lecture 13 (3/1) Curved Space-time: The Geometry of the Universe?
  
• Lecture 14 (3/3) Big bang Cosmology Will the Expansion Stop?
  
• Lecture 15 (3/8) Summary: Philosophical Implications, Paradigms, Positivism and Falsification
  
• Lecture 15 reading
• Lecture 16 (3/10) Key experiments leading to Quantum Mechanics
• Lecture 17 (3/15) Two-slits done doubly well
  
• Lecture 18 (3/17) Structure of quantum theory, uncertainty, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Experiment
  
• Lecture 19 (3/29) Bell tolls for Local Realism?
  
• Lecture 20 (3/31) Consciousness: Functionalism
  
• Lecture 21 (4/5) Consciousness: Physicalism
  
• First reading assignment on Physicalism: What Mary Couldn't Know: Belief about Phenomenal States, by M. Nida-Rumelin, (1966)
  
• Second reading on Physicalism: What Mary Didn't Know by F. Jackson, Journal of Philosophy vol. 83, p. 291 (1986)
  
• Third reading on Physicalism: What is it Like to be a Bat by T. Nagel (1974)
  
• Fourth reading on Physicalism: Epiphenomenal Qualia by F. Jackson (1982)
  
• Supplement for Lecture 21- Physicalism and Panpsychism
  
• Lecture 22 (4/7) Perspectives on quantum measurement
  
• Lecture 23 (4/14) Arrows of Time
  
• Lecture 24 (4/19) Big Bang Cosmology
  
• Lecture 25
  
• Lecture 26
  
• Lecture 27
  
• Elliott Sober's Critique on Modus tollens
  
• Alan D. Sokal - "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneneutics of Quantum Gravity"