Past courses have examined issues such as infectious diseases, climate change, relativity, recycling, genetics, pseudoscience, cosmology and chaos theory. These issues are explored through hands-on experience, reading, writing, and discussion. The ethical and moral dilemmas faced by scientists throughout the ages are an essential component of this course. We will learn how scientists discern the properties of the world around us, what constitutes valid scientific evidence, and why scientists do what they do. That's what science is all about - figuring things out.
Science is a lot like swimming.
You can read every book in the library about swimming, but you still don't know how to swim until you jump in the water and try it. In the same way, you can read volumes about science, but you will not really understand it until you do some yourself. We will investigate the above ideas through interesting scientific topics. In the past, we have examined a baffling blue beaker, the climate change debate, chaos theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, cosmology, genetics, and the spread of disease. However, we investigate these from a scientific viewpoint.