OLLI 0169 - A Brief History of Time
Course Description
The gradual growth in our knowledge of the universe is reflected in the history of our understanding of space and time. It is a history in which nearly all of the apparently obvious features had to be discarded, beginning with a flat Earth and ending with Euclidean geometry. In tracing this story, the course follows parts of Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and Kip Thorne's "Black Holes and Time Warps." The presentation is at the level of astronomy for poets. There will be no equations and no expectation that people have taken chemistry or physics, but curiosity about the physical universe is a prerequisite.
Presenter(s)
John Friedman
John Friedman, a distinguished professor emeritus at UWM, has worked on a variety of problems in gravitational physics, involving neutron stars, black holes, gravitational waves, and the topology of spacetime. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Friedman served as chair of its gravitational physics section. He has been on the editorial boards of Physical Review D and Classical and Quantum Gravity and was Divisional Associate Editor of Physical Review Letters, among the leading journals in physics. Over the course of his career, grants from NSF and NASA on which he was a principal investigator brought over $3M to UWM. Friedman's B.A. is from Harvard, his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under Nobel laureate S. Chandrasekhar.