This class explores the changing roles of physics and physicists during the 20th century. Topics range from relativity theory and quantum mechanics to high-energy physics and cosmology. We examine the development of modern physics and the role of physicists within shifting institutional, cultural, and political contexts, such as Imperial Britain, Nazi Germany, and the US during World War II, and the Cold War.
Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th Century
Massachusetts Institute of Technology via MIT OpenCourseWare
Overview
Syllabus
- Lecture 1: Introduction to Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th Century
- Lecture 2: Faraday, Thomson, and Maxwell: Lines of Force in the Ether
- Lecture 3: Worldviews, Wranglers, and the Making of Theoretical Physicists
- Lecture 4: Waves in the Ether
- Lecture 5: Einstein and Experiment
- Lecture 6: Reception of Special Relativity
- Lecture 7: A Political History of Gravity
- Lecture 8: Rethinking Light
- Lecture 9: Rethinking Matter
- Lecture 10: Matrices and Uncertainty
- Lecture 11: Waves and Probabilities
- Lecture 12: Quantum Weirdness: Schrödinger’s Cat, EPR, and Bell’s Theorem
- Lecture 13: Physics under Hitler
- Lecture 14: Radar and the Manhattan Project
- Optional Discussion: The Day After Trinity
- Lecture 16: Secrecy and Security in the Nuclear Age
- Optional Discussion: Containment
- Lecture 18: Coldwar Classroom: Teaching Quantum Theory in Postwar American Physics
- Lecture 19: Counterculture and Physics
- Lecture 20: A Conservative Revolution: QED and Renormalization
- Lecture 21: Teaching Feynman's Tools: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics
- Lecture 22: Quarks, QCD, and the Rise of the Standard Model
- Lecture 23: The Birth of Particle Cosmology
- Lecture 24: The Big Bang, Cosmic Inflation, and the Latest Observations
- Lecture 25: String Theory and the Multiverse
Taught by
Prof. David Kaiser
