Learn how thinkers across centuries came to understand the movements of planets, moons, and stars—and thereby gain a deeper understanding of what it means to know.
How can you know, through evidence and logic, that the Earth revolves around the Sun? How can you measure the distance to the Moon without leaving Earth? Can understanding the methods and processes involved in learning such things help you to think more clearly and live more fully? It can.
In this course, Joseph Tabenkin will survey various methods used by Eudoxus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, and more to reach their world-changing discoveries. And he will show you how to understand such truths based on your own perceptual observations and logical integrations.
You will learn:
- What to look for when you gaze up at the stars,
- How to conceptualize what you see,
- The basic mechanisms governing the movements of celestial bodies,
- How these mechanisms play out on a cosmic scale,
- And how knowledge of the principles involved apply to your life, here on Earth.
The course does not assume any prior knowledge of math or physics. You will learn the methods of scientific thinking from scratch.
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