Calendar

SES # TOPICS KEY DATES
Week 1: Introduction
1 Introductory Lecture
Week 2: Beginnings
2 "What is Science?"
3 The Presocratics
Week 3: The World According to Plato and Aristotle
4 Plato's World
5 Aristotle's Physics
Week 4: Aristotle's Biology
6 Aristotle and Hippocrates on Biology and Medicine First Paper Due
Week 5: Ancient Mathematics, Astronomy, and Engineering
7 Ptolemy and Euclid
8 Galen and Alexandrian Engineers
Week 6: Science in the Middle Ages
9 Arabic Science
10 Medieval European Universities
Week 7: Medieval Technology
11 Medieval Technology
Week 8: The European Renaissance
12 No lecture In-class Midterm Exam
13 Patronage, Alchemy, and Humanism
Week 9: Revolutions in the Body and in the Stars
14 Vesalius and Anatomy
15 The Copernican Revolution Second Paper Due
Week 10: Observatories and Ellipses
16 Tycho Brahe and the New Astronomy
17 Kepler: Mysticism and Mars
Week 11: Galileo: Astronomy, and the Church
18 Interpreting Scripture and the Heavens
Week 12: Galileo's Physics and Bacon's Collecting
19 Galileo's Physics
20 Bacon and the Culture of Collecting Second Paper Revision Due
Week 13: Descartes's New Methods for the New Sciences
21 Descartes's Mechanical Philosophy
Week 14: Newton and Newtonianism
22 Newton's Dynamics and Gravitation
23 Newton's Optics and the Culture of Newtonianism
Week 15: Laboratories, Societies, and Gentlemen
24 England's Royal Society
25 No lecture Final Paper Due