Welcome to ISP 205-001, Visions of the Universe. As the title suggests, in this course we shall study the discoveries of modern astronomy and their implications for our place in the cosmos. Within the past decade, humans have discovered new worlds around other stars and determined that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. You are lucky to be living in such an exciting time! These new discoveries also demonstrate how much we don’t yet understand; in particular, the part of the universe that we see—stars, galaxies, gas and dust—is only a small fraction of all the matter in the universe.
Ass't Professor Edward Brown
Department of Physics and Astronomy
3250 Biomed Phys Sci
browned@msu.edu
Click here to download (pdf format)
Bennett, Donahue, Schneider & Voit, The Essential Cosmic Perspective