Stanford freshmen to consider the cosmos

In Thinking About the Universe, freshmen will explore profound questions about the cosmos – its beginnings, structure, extent and fate – with a philosopher, an experimental physicist and a theoretical physicist as their guides. The course is one of the new offerings in the Thinking Matters program, which is designed to help students transition from high school to college by introducing them to a multidisciplinary approach to learning that emphasizes critical analysis, close reading and creative problem solving.

By Kathleen J. Sullivan

When philosophy Professor Thomas Ryckman heard he had a kindred spirit on campus – a physics professor named Peter Michelson who was also interested in creating a freshman introductory course about contemporary cosmology – he sent him an email.

"I envisage a narrowly tailored 'how and why thinking about the universe has changed' type of course, along historical-philosophical-astronomical-cosmological lines," wrote Ryckman, whose research focuses on the philosophy of physics. "If a course of this type is of any interest to you, I'd be happy to discuss it over coffee or lunch."

Michelson, an experimental physicist whose research focuses on high-energy astrophysics, responded with an enthusiastic "yes." He suggested increasing the teaching team – and academic perspectives – to three by bringing in Peter Graham, a theoretical physicist who designs experiments to understand the nature of dark matter.

As they were planning the course, Ryckman, Michelson and Graham could often be seen huddled in discussions at Bytes Café in the Science and Engineering Quad – Ryckman and Michelson with pads of paper and pens, and Graham with a laptop.

That was two years ago.

Today, Ryckman, Michelson and Graham are busy preparing lectures and finalizing the syllabus for Thinking About the Universe: What do we know? How do we know it?

The class will be offered winter quarter as part of Stanford's Thinking Matters program.

Now in its third year, Thinking Matters was one of several new initiatives Stanford launched following a comprehensive examination of undergraduate education.

Thinking Matters courses are designed to help freshmen make the transition from high school to college by developing a sense of what constitutes a genuine question or problem, and how to address it in a creative and disciplined manner. The courses emphasize critical analysis, close reading, analytic writing and effective communication. Freshmen must take at least one Thinking Matters course as part of their general education requirements.

In lively lectures and small-group discussions students discover collaborative ways to solve problems and understand issues. The courses also introduce students to a multidisciplinary approach to learning that will help inform their future academic pursuits and intellectual lives.

"Thanks to faculty members coming forward with exciting proposals, the Thinking Matters program has succeeded in providing freshmen with an 'on-ramp' to college-level learning, helping them to engage productively with the intellectual life of the university," said Russell A. Berman, a professor of comparative literature and of German studies, and the faculty director of Thinking Matters.

What is “Thinking Matters”?

For more than 90 years Stanford has delivered courses specifically intended for — and required of — freshmen that are suited to their distinctive character and needs. Thinking Matters courses foreground significant and enduring questions and approach them from multiple perspectives. In high school, students may have spent a great deal of time providing answers to questions with a ‘right answer’ like those on the SAT exams. In Thinking Matters, the main goal is to help students develop the ability to ask rigorous and genuine questions that can lead to scientific experimentation or literary interpretation or social policy analysis. Thinking Matters also helps students discover, in a lively lecture and seminar format, collaborative ways to approach solving problems and understanding issues.

Learn more about Thinking Matters

Evolution of Thinking About the Universe

Thinking About the Universe is one of eight new Thinking Matters courses for the 2014-15 academic year.

In the course, students will explore questions about the universe, its beginnings, structure, extent and fate from several perspectives – philosophical, experimental and theoretical.

"It's part of being human to want to know about who we are and where we are in the great scheme of things," Ryckman said.

"There is nothing more sobering than to realize that Earth is just a tiny little infinitesimal speck in a much vaster universe. It is the responsibility of every intelligent person to have some awareness of what is now known – and of how it is now known – about the universe."

Thinking Matters courses are developed through a rigorous vetting process that involves the same kinds of probing questions that are at the core of the program itself.

After the preliminary proposal for Thinking About the Universe won approval, the professors pitched their course to a board composed of faculty, postdoctoral scholars and students.

"During our presentation, they grilled us about various aspects of the course," Michelson said. "I actually kind of enjoyed the discussion, but afterward we thought, 'well, that didn't go so well.'"

"On the other hand, I think they were taken by our enthusiasm and excitement about doing a course like this," Ryckman said. "Look, it's the big issue. What could be bigger than having some understanding of the universe? As a species, this is what every culture and every civilization has tried to figure out. Here we are in the 21st century and suddenly we have all this new data. The new data can be explained by certain kinds of the theories, but the theories require more – more than the data allows us to conclude."

As it turned out, the board shared their enthusiasm, and approved the course.

"This is exactly the sort of course that meets the goals of the Thinking Matters program, because it poses major questions and invites freshmen to participate in university-level intellectual inquiry," Berman said.

Thinking about the Universe

Professors Thomas Ryckman, Peter Graham and Peter Michelson finalize the syllabus for ‘’Thinking About the Universe: What do we know? How do we know it?’’

We want to communicate to freshmen that science is not just something you read about in a textbook. It's a living process. It's happening right now.

—Professor Thomas Ryckman

Considering the theory of cosmic inflation

One topic the course will explore is the theory of cosmic inflation, which has revolutionized our thinking about how the universe came to be after the Big Bang. According to the theory, very soon after the universe came into existence, it underwent a short-lived phase of exponential expansion. The consequences of this episode orchestrated the evolution of the cosmos.

The theory of cosmic inflation took a step toward validation earlier this year when researchers from the BICEP2 experiment – a collaboration of 11 universities, including Stanford – announced that they had indirectly detected gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that were created in the first moments of the universe after the Big Bang.

Although the discovery still requires independent confirmation, gravitational waves are a key prediction of the processes outlined in the theory of cosmic inflation, and their detection would shore up its place in physics. Since the announcement, other researchers have questioned the findings. Now, everyone is waiting for more information.

Graham said the topic is useful for Thinking About the Universe, because it presents profound questions: How do you decide if something is true? When is a theory proven? How much can we ever learn about the earliest moments in the history of the universe?

Ryckman said the team is eager to share their passion for studying the universe.

"We want to communicate to these freshmen that science is not just something you read about in a textbook," he said. "It's a living process. It's happening right now. There are controversies. There are egos involved. There are unanswered questions. Cosmology is the epitome of where science and controversy meet – and always has been. We want to communicate something of the excitement of how much we actually know about things that are far away in time and space."

Each Thinking Matters course has postdoctoral fellows who lead discussion sections and offer one-on-one tutorials. Thinking About the Universe has three fellows – two with doctorates in physics and one with a doctorate in philosophy.

"The postdoctoral fellows are terrific," Michelson said. "They are absolutely essential to the course. We're already working with them on the syllabus and reading materials."

The reading list includes Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe, by Jeremiah Ostriker and Simon Mitton, and the national bestseller The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Brian Greene, who is considered a "rock star" in the world of theoretical physics.

Michelson said the three faculty members will be at all the lectures, with one of them probably taking the lead role in individual classes.

"I expect that the dialogue among us will be an important component of the course," he said. "More important still is the dialogue with the students taking the course. I really look forward to that."

New courses for 2014-15

Freshmen will contemplate diverse perspectives on profound questions in eight new Thinking Matters courses, from the ideals that animate the notion of liberty, to the classical roots, medieval developments and contemporary permutations of the concept of love in the Western tradition.

Autumn:

Justice and the Constitution (William S. Koski, law; Rob Reich, political science)
What is Love? (David Lummus, French and Italian; Kathryn Starkey, German studies)

Winter:

Belief (Michelle Karnes, English; Tanya Luhrmann, anthropology)
Thinking About the Universe: What do we know? How do we know it? (Peter Graham, physics; Peter Michelson, physics; Thomas Ryckman, philosophy)
Why So Few? Gender Diversity and Leadership (Shelley J. Correll, sociology)

Spring:

Inventing Government: Ancient and Modern (Josiah Ober, political science and classics)
Reading the Body: How Medicine and Culture Define the Self (Cari Costanzo, anthropology; Abraham Verghese, medicine)
Stories Everywhere (Adam Johnson, English; Blakey Vermeule, English)

What is Love?

Profs. Lummus & Starkey

Meeting the Global Sustainability Challenge

Profs. Koseff & Matson

Belief

Profs. Luhrmann & Karnes

Reading the Body

Profs. Verghese & Costanzo

Rules of War

Profs. Weiner & Sagan

Justice and the Constitution

Profs. Reich & Koski

Thinking Matters faculty teams talk about their courses

Thinking Matters courses, which are taught in teams, foster extensive collaboration among faculty, both within and across departments and schools. The program's faculty come from a range of humanities, science, engineering and social science fields, as well as the Schools of Law and Medicine.

To hear faculty members talk about their courses, click on their photos.