1. Lesson 1: A Little Bit About This On-line Text

Quarks, Spacetime, and the Big Bang is a book designed to accompany a general education course of the same name that I’ve taught at Michigan State University for a number of years. Why? Well, there’s a story there.

The North American approach to university education is nearly unique in the world. Citizen-students come to college in order to become proficient in a focused few areas of study (your “major”) but are also broadly educated in many other areas (“general education”). So an English major would dive deeply into literature but also take courses in physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, history, anthropology, psychology, etc. Likewise a physics major would study physics and mathematics, but also biology, literature, psychology, and so on. Every U.S. campus manages this deep-plus-broad approach to higher education in its own way.

This approach to higher education is credited to the Harvard University president Abbott Lawrence Lowell who began transforming undergraduate education in 1909. Under him, fields of concentration (majors) were established along with required sampling of courses outside of majors, the distribution requirement. "A well-educated man must know a little bit of everything and one thing well." affected college education across America to this day.

Creating courses for non-specialists in the sciences is especially challenging, but it's important because many of society's big problems are scientific at their roots: Climate change. Energy production. Evolution and big bang in schools. Nuclear power. Nuclear proliferation. NASA. NIH. Vaccination. Pandemics. Weather. Health effects (or not) of common radiation sources. Peer review. Basic versus applied research. Should I go on?

An informed citizen needs to understand some scientific facts, while also appreciating how science is done: all too often, controversy swirls as much around what is or isn’t “science” as it does to the details. How best to do this in physics?

Many physics departments will offer astronomy courses (or of course, astronomy departments will when they exist), physics of music, physics of energy issues, physics of light, and so on. Our department is no different in that respect. By the way, 50,000 students take college-credit astronomy every year in the United States!

There are many physics courses for non-science college students. The traditional course is often informally called “Physics for Poets,” which is a conceptual (less mathematical) version of the otherwise full-physics curriculum taught to science and engineering students. But there are other paths which teach physics by shining a light on particularly interesting topics in accessible presentations.