PHYS 273 Energy and Environment ©
Course Introduction Transcript
Hi, my name is Gabrielle Rosenbaum, I’m your professor for this course: Energy and
Environment. As the name implies, we’re going to be talking about energy in the context
of the environment. We’re going to start by looking at what energy means for physicists,
so we’re going to define energy, talk about the law of conservation of energy, all things
that are just general laws of physics, we’re gonna look at the laws of thermodynamics,
we’re going to look at entropy, and then, from there, we’re going to look at how humans
use energy on the earth. The consumption of energy in different forms and then we’ll
look at energy production. We’ll spend a few weeks going through different ways in
which we produce energy, both renewable and non-renewable, some of the pros and
cons of this and quantifying this. From there we’ll look at the idea of conserving energy,
we’ll look at the idea of pollution, and we’ll look at climate change at the end. So, I’ll tell
you a little bit about what this course is not; this course is not a quantitative science
course where I expect you to do very detailed mathematical calculations, any
calculations will be very simple and you won’t be having to memorize a lot of data. The
idea is to look at concepts and trends when we talk about quantitative things. This
course is not an economics course or a political science course, so what you’ll see is a
lot of the concepts that we talked about clearly meet economics and politics very
closely, we’re just going to be able to talk about the science involved which, of course,
should affect economics, and should affect politics, but we’re not going to talk about
those other things, so we’ll focus just on the science. To be clear, I won’t be giving my
opinion at all, I’ll be talking about just facts and science. The course is divided into 12
lessons, so each week is a new lesson, that lesson will start with a little introduction
video like this, then there’ll be a series of lectures narrated by me, there might be some
activities and little videos to watch as well, and then every week, every single week,
there will be a quiz. So, you take a little online quiz at the end of each lesson. There will
also be a midterm and a final exam, in terms of communication it will all be done online,
of course, so there will be a discussion board. This is what you use to ask questions
that are pertinent to the whole class. So, this is things you don’t understand about a
lecture or questions about the final exam, things like that, for personal issues, you can
email me, you can email your TA as well. The idea is to have an online discussion that
the class can see and interact with as well. There’s lots of information in the course
outline, so you want to go through that it tells you dates and things like that as well as
grading schemes and some other details. I hope you enjoy the course and if you have
questions, stay in touch and have fun!
© May not be copied or duplicated
without the permission of the owner.
1