Einstein was the first celebrity scientist and as an icon, his views on religion, his Jewish heritage, freedom, race relations, politics, war, and humanity are well documented and offer valuable insights for us today. Through the seminar, we will read and discuss essays on these topics by Einstein and others. This honors seminar will guide students through one of the most important such theories: Einstein's Theory of Special and General Relativity, which changed forever our view of space and time.
The first half of the seminar will start with physics and astronomy around the turn of the 20th century and summarize the classical view of space and time due to Galileo and Newton. In the second half we will transition to modern astronomy, using several chapters from an introductory astronomy text, to cover black holes, gravity waves, gravitational lensing, and cosmology.