2025-2026 Academic Year

CHEM 19.2 – What (And How) Science Has Taught Us About The World We Live In (Spring 2026)

Course Meeting: 6 Wednesday meetings, April 22nd – May 27th, 2026

Course Description:

Whereas psychology, sociology, history, and economics set out to learn and explain how people feel, behave, and live in society, science has as its less ambitious goal an understanding of the purely physical world. This class will discuss several life-changing world views and facts that science has taught us and how we came to discover and be sure of them. These discoveries include the facts that: the earth is billions of years old; the earth goes around the sun; all physical things – including us – are made up of atoms; all living things – including us – have a common ancestor, a single cell; our blood circulates from the heart and back to the heart every minute; and infectious diseases are caused by microscopic “bugs” (single cells like bacteria) and viruses. In each case we will discuss the roles of systematic observation, the testing of ideas against controlled experiments, and the technologies that make this possible, including telescopes, microscopes, radioactivity detectors, and genome sequencing.