As part of my training at Shimer College, I’m taking one of the core courses this semester (much as I took the fine arts class last fall). This time I’m doing one that I am unlikely to teach myself: Natural Sciences 1, which is billed as a chemistry course. I just picked up my first few books yesterday, which were as follows:
- Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics
- Aristotle, Physics
- Lucretius, The Nature of Things
This should be good.
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 7:30 am
No wonder you say “billed as a chemistry course”! But part of me wishes that anyone coming into philosophy had read ancient physics anyways.
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 7:35 am
We do eventually get to modern chemistry, and there’s also a lab component.
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 8:27 am
I expected so, but a very Shimer approach to it. My experience of college intro chem is modern inorganic theory demonstrated in lab. Which, with subject variation, is also what I’ve seen in college intro calc and physics, and the higher levels build on it basically the same way. Very little in the way of intellectual foundations. Yours sounds more pleasant than usual. :)
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 8:37 am
I think the point is to get the students thinking about what kinds of problems chemistry is grappling with, rather than viewing it as a set of pre-given results. From what I hear, students sometimes “experience” the shock of new discoveries more or less directly — for instance, the notion that atoms are divisible will come as a surprise after they’ve been immersed in the pre-modern stuff. (I guess they don’t remember their high school chem class very well? Still, it seems cool.)
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 10:50 am
Long ago, in my senior year physics seminar, I presented on efforts at gravity wave detection. The talk began with Aristotle, Euclid, and some other ancient notions of space and movement, touched on medieval theories of gravitation, then introduced Newton, with a focus on the absolute, flat space his gravity required, then the horror of Leibniz, and later Gauss, at this kind of space, finally pushing into Einstein’s general relativity. Oh, and at the end described some actual ongoing experiments. For some reason, it took me another five years to realize I had no interest in a physics career.
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 11:39 am
I look forward to hearing about this.
Friday, August 17, 2012 at 11:42 am
I am specifically interested in how far you get in to modern chemistry and the form that material takes.