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WHAT IS BIG HISTORY?
WHY DO WE LOOK AT THINGS FROM
FAR AWAY AND CLOSE UP?
UNIT 1
WHAT IS BIG HISTORY?
CONTENTS
UNIT 1 BASICS
3 Unit 1 Overview
4 Unit 1 Learning Outcomes
5 Unit 1 Lessons
7 Unit 1 Key Concepts
KEY CONTENT
9 What Is Big History?
10 Big History Timeline
11 A Big History of Everything
12 Powers of Ten
13 Notations & Measures
14 Big Questions
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KEY CONTENT (continued)
15 Origin Stories Introduction
16 Are We Alone?
17 Introduction to Cosmology
18 Introduction to Astrophysics
19 A Big History of Everything
20 Complexity & Thresholds
21 Thresholds of Increasing Complexity
LOOKING AHEAD
23 What’s Next in Unit 2?
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UNIT 1
OVERVIEW
Key Discipline:
Big History
Timespan:
13.8 billion years ago
Driving Question:
Why do we look at things from far away and close up?
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UNIT 1
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of Unit 1, students should be able to:
1.
Define thresholds of increasing complexity, origin stories, and scale.
2.
Understand that Big History is a modern, science-based origin story that draws on many
different types of knowledge.
3.
Understand how they fit into the Big History narrative, using the concept of “thresholds” to
frame your past, present, and future as well as the history of the Universe.
4.
Understand what disciplines are and consider how the viewpoints of many different scholars
can be integrated for a better understanding of a topic.
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UNIT 1
LESSONS
1.0 Welcome to Big History
What is Big History? How is it different from other courses you have taken? Big History is a course
that attempts to study some of the most interesting questions that humans can ask by surveying
the entire history of the Universe using the best evidence available from many disciplines.
1.1 Scale
A mile, a year, a foot – all our everyday measures relate to a familiar scale. Big History is so big,
though, that we need to use entirely different measurements on an entirely different scale.
1.2 Origin Stories
People have always told origin stories – stories about how the Universe and humans came to be.
Big History is a modern, scientific origin story, told by a global community.
1.3 What Are Disciplines?
What is a “discipline”? How are the disciplines different in the questions they ask and the evidence
they gather? Big History relies on the ideas of many disciplines to tell its story.
Continued next slide
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UNIT 1
LESSONS
Continued from previous slide
1.4 My Big History
In a story that covers 13.8 billion years, you can’t talk about everything. What do you include and
what do you leave out? Fragile, diverse, precise, and punctuating the creation of something entirely
new in the Universe – thresholds of increasing complexity are a foundation of Big History.
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UNIT 1
KEY CONCEPTS
• astrophysics
• origin story
• Big Bang
• religion
• Big History
• scale
• complexity
• science
• cosmology
• scientific notation
• emergent properties
• thresholds of increasing
complexity
• entropy (the law of)
• Goldilocks Conditions
• Universe
• history
• ingredients
• interdisciplinary approach
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KEY CONTENT
WHAT IS BIG HISTORY?
Video Talk / David Christian
• Big History tells the story of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present, a time span of 13.8
billion years.
• Big History is the modern, scientific origin story, based on the best evidence that scientists and
historians have compiled to date. As new and better evidence is found, the story will need
to be updated.
• Big History asks big questions. Among the questions that big historians tackle are: How was the
Universe created? Why does it work the way it does? Why are stars so big? Why are you and
I so small?
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BIG HISTORY
TIMELINE
Infographic
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A BIG HISTORY OF
EVERYTHING
Video
• This video begins with the statement that Big History is “the story of how we almost didn’t
happen.”
• One example of this idea is in the physical relationship of the Earth and the Sun. Earth is in a
location that allows liquid water to exist. Any closer to the Sun and the oceans would boil; any
further away and everything would be frozen.
• Another example is the physical relationship of the Earth and Moon. The Moon helps stabilize
the Earth’s rotation, helping to ensure a stable climate. If the Moon does not perform this
function, life on Earth would be very different.
• Jupiter also plays an important role in protecting the Earth from asteroid impacts. Because
Jupiter is so large, its gravitational attraction keep many asteroids from threatening the Earth.
• The timeline of Big History is the timeline of the history of the Universe since the Big Bang. Big
History presents the past as a series of interconnected events, not just a series of events that
happen over a period of time.
• This timeline is built around eight events called thresholds of complexity. At these moments, on
the one hand, the Universe exhibited a significant increase in its level of complexity. On the other
hand, a line was crossed from which it would be very difficult to reverse. Undoing the creation of
space, time, matter, and energy would be very difficult.
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POWERS OF TEN
Video
• Big History tells a story that involves thinking on the biggest scales, like the size of the Universe
and the age of the Universe; and on the smallest scales, like the size of the nucleus of a
hydrogen atom or the amount of time it took for the first matter to be created.
• Powers of Ten shows what it means to move from the biggest scales to the smallest scales.
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NOTATIONS & MEASURES
Infographic
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BIG QUESTIONS
Video
• This video is a very short introduction to importance of big questions in the Big History course.
• How did the Universe begin? What is the meaning of life? How did life begin? What does it
mean to be human? How does modern science help you think about these questions? These
are just some of the questions that students will be asked to consider in the course.
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ORIGIN STORIES
INTRODUCTION
Article / Cynthia Stokes Brown
In the first article, Cynthia Stokes Brown introduces the theme of origin stories and discusses why
they are so common across cultures.
• Origin stories answer important questions like “How was the Universe created?” and “How were
humans created?” They reassure people about their place in the world.
• Origin stories differ from society to society, and some societies may have multiple origin stories
or have different versions of the same story.
• In the remaining articles, Cynthia Stokes Brown and Craig Benjamin compile a variety of origin
stories that emphasize different questions and teach different lessons. The stories represented
are: Chinese, Greek, Iroquois, Judeo-Christian, and Mayan. Brown also offers an example of a
modern scientific origin story.
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ARE WE ALONE?
Video
• This short video provides a first look at the question about whether or not life exists in other parts
of the Universe.
• Over the course of the last century, scientists discovered that the Universe is unimaginably big.
In the last 20 years, scientists have discovered many planets outside our solar system. It is
possible that many of these planets have conditions like those on Earth that allowed life to
evolve.
• The possibility that life—even complex life—exists somewhere in the Universe is a relatively new
idea. Astronomers and physicists are currently searching the Universe for exoplanets and
exoplanets that have Earth-like conditions. What was once thought to be a topic suitable only for
works of science fiction is now an important research focus for astronomers and physicists.
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INTRODUCTION TO
COSMOLOGY
Video Talk/ Tim McKay
• Tim McKay is a cosmologist at the University of Michigan.
• Cosmology is discipline that focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of the Universe.
• Cosmologists study the history of the Universe by observing the characteristics of light emitted
by distant objects. They can learn about the characteristics of stars and galaxies from the light
they emit. They can also measure how far the light from distant galaxies has traveled to reach
the Earth to help determine the age of the Universe.
• Some of the mysteries that cosmologists are trying to resolve include questions about what
existed before the Big Bang, the nature of dark matter, what is causing the acceleration in the
expansion of the Universe, and whether or not there is life in other parts of the Universe.
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INTRODUCTION TO
ASTROPHYSICS
Video Talk/Janna Levin
• Janna Levin is an astrophysicist at Barnard College.
• Astrophysics is a discipline that focuses on understanding the physical laws of the Universe and
how math can be used to describe natural phenomena.
• There are four types of astrophysicists: experimentalists create tests and build technology to
detect and confirm ideas about the nature of the Universe; observers use telescopes to make
observations that will provide evidence about the nature of the Universe; theorists use math to
make predictions based on observations and experiments; and fourth category combine all three
approaches .
• Math is a critical to the work of astrophysicists. Math connects us to the natural world, allows us
to understand how it works, and allows us to describe it.
• Some of the mysteries that astrophysicists are trying to resolve include questions about how the
Universe began, how is the Universe evolving, and how many dimensions are there in the
Universe. Perhaps the most important question that astrophysicists concerns the nature of the
matter that the Universe is made of.
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A BIG HISTORY OF
EVERYTHING
Video
• Thresholds of increasing complexity are critical events in the story of Big History and are
fundamental to an understanding of the story of the Universe.
• Entropy is the natural tendency of all things in the Universe to move from order to disorder, from
organization to chaos, from the complexity to the simplicity. This tendency is considered a
fundamental law of the Universe.
• Threshold moments seem to defy this law because at these moments the Universe moves to a
more complex state rather than to a simpler one.
• Big History is organized around eight thresholds when the Universe showed a significant
increase in complexity.
• Gravity has played an important role in these threshold moments, helping bring about the
formation of stars and planets, which allowed for the evolution of life. As this succession of
thresholds suggests, each threshold builds upon previous ones.
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COMPLEXITY &
THRESHOLDS
Article / David Christian
• Complexity is hard to define, but there are three characteristics that will help you identify it in this
course. Complex things tend to have:
• Diverse ingredients
• Precise arrangements
• Emergent properties
• When the right combination of ingredients are arranged in a precise way, together they have
properties that the individual ingredients did not.
• Complexity is rarer than simplicity in the Universe.
• When the Universe experiences a significant increase in complexity, we call it a threshold of
increasing complexity. In this course, we will focus on eight such thresholds.
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LOOKING AHEAD
WHAT’S NEXT?
In Unit 2, we will focus on the Big Bang, which marks the beginning of 13.8 billion years in
Big History. We will learn:
•
How the theory of the Big Bang developed.
•
The ways that modern scientists built on the work of prior generations and used the tools of
their time to understand the Universe.
•
What the very early history of the Universe looked like and what it generated.
•
How our Universe has changed over time.
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