Maybe you missed Neil deGrasse Tyson’s much-lauded “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” documentary series on National Geographic last year, or perhaps you were hooked by the easy-to-grasp way the uber-astrophysicist explains how the science we know relates to what’s left to understand. In either case, you may still feel left adrift in a whirlwind of information.
Find firmer footing by taking his online course, The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries, which digs even deeper into the much-misunderstood world of and in and for which we’re made.
For $39 — discounted until July 2, 2015, from the original $99 cost — this four-hour course is for students of all skill levels, excluding of course those students still required to nap in early afternoon. ?Bonus: Those who successfully complete the course will get nothing less than a Certificate of Completion to appear upon their wall of many accolades.
Already awarded a Telly Ward for Outstanding Educational Program, the class is divided into six lectures that will explore: the idea of quantum foam, how space and time’s fabric is so densely curved into itself that it’s best described as “the froth on a latte”; the anomalous orbit of the Pioneer spaceship; how about 65 billion hyperactive neutrinos, discovered in 1956 to be made by the sun, pass through every centimeter of your body every second it’s facing the sun; and the perplexing-to-grasp idea of string theory,?which attempts to answer the question of what the world is really made of. We’ll let deGrasse Tyson describe that one.
The class, available at Udemy, “explores the most tantalizing, mind-bending questions at the forefront of scientific inquiry using visually stunning, 3-D virtual environments,” says Ed Leon, senior vice president of product development at The Great Courses organization, which is promoting the course. DeGrasse Tyson says in promotional materials:
“I don’t just take you there and drop you into the abyss of the unknown. I build up a case for what we do know.”
And if all this understanding of the outer-reaches is still too pricey for your real-world budget, deGrasse Tyson just brought his podcast, “StarTalk,” to the National Geographic channel, on Mondays at 11 p.m. Eastern. However you find him, his way of condensing the expansiveness of the universe shouldn’t be missed. A nugget:
?“We are a part of this universe. We are in this universe. But perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us.”
