Astronomy is a mathematical topic. We haven’t figured out what to put in the textbooks yet. Let me write down one of them, the Second Law, looks like this: One of the things that Newton did with this equation was he took a particular force, namely the force of gravity, which he also wrote down a Law of Gravity. There can’t be a textbook. So, I will leave you with that, the rest of you I’ll see you on Thursday morning.Most of the lectures and course material within Open Yale Courses are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. And in the early twentieth century what happens is two new laws of physics are invented. The Royal Astronomical Society, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. [laughter] The way one approaches that is through a kind of common sense approach which involves the fact that many of us have been in a car, driving from City A to City B, perhaps not Cleveland, but somewhere else, and so you have a kind of intuition to fall back on. And then we tell these stories. The other piece of the new concept is that these laws are mathematical in nature. That’s just the way God made it. Students that graduate with a degree at this level can often find assistant researcher roles within astronomy software departments, telescope operations and observatories.Students that move on to a graduate program can gain collegiate level instructional opportunities by becoming a teaching assistant. There’s also an optional paper. Go read any fantasy novel.
So, this is a situation in which, what ten years ago was science fiction, has become science fact and we’re very rapidly trying to figure out exactly what kinds of planets these are, whether there are Earth-like planets out there, and that has some bearing on what the science fiction people refer to when they say as, “life as we know it.” And so, that’s currently one of the hottest topics in astronomy.The next topic is going to be black holes, and this is a similar situation. And one of the features of that is that there will be answer sheets. The lecture on April 17, 2020 received that designation this season.
The point is that it vividly illustrates a moral, which tells you how to behave or how not to behave and they’re useful for that reason. I should say that the word simple in there turns out to have a technical meaning if you take a statistics course. We’ve got two big theories. We’re going to stick to it. So, there will be a progression to more and more sophisticated theories of gravity underlying these observations.There’s another feature that these topics have in common, and that is that they can be understood in some detail without particularly sophisticated mathematics. These circles were called epicycles. You guys can do better than that.
Astronomy students will also need to take foundational courses in physics to grasp key Newtonian concepts.One of the most popular specializations within astronomy is astrophysics, or the study of how physics operates in the universe. But all the information, and actually more information is online. Yes?I will also say there is a rather detailed lateness policy that’s linked to the classes server, please read that. I won’t go into string theories now, you can go read many popular books on this; it’s very exciting. Unless explicitly set forth in the applicable Credits section of a lecture, third-party content is not covered under the Creative Commons license. The first of which, I want to go back and catch one of Kepler’s Laws. All you have to do is watch Star Trek or something like that and you’ll find many, many examples and this has been a staple of science fiction for quite a long time. I think it’s something to do with the way our brains are wired, to accept that this is true. This happens quite frequently in scientific topics these days, particularly those with kind of political or moral overtones, and you get facts that directly contradict each other. This is mass, so heavy things are when relativity kicks in.