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41 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Big History:
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a modern scientific origin story.
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Complexity:
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A quality or state reflecting the number of distinct components and the specific ways they are connected.
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Thresholds of increasing complexity:
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Moments in the history of the Universe when specific ingredients under the right "Goldilocks Conditions" are transformed to create something entirely new and more complex.
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Scale:
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Degrees of magnification, or perspective, used to measure time, space, and size.
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Origin Stories:
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An attempt to explain the beginning of humanity and the Universe.
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Claim Testing:
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The use of four strategies to decide whether a story or concept should or should not be trusted. The four strategies are intuition, authority, logic, and evidence.
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Collective Learning:
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The ability to share, preserves, and build upon ideas over time.
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Goldilocks Conditions:
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Specific set of conditions necessary to enable greater complexity.
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Big Bang:
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A theory, first articulated in the 1930s, that proposes the entire Universe sprang from an extremely dense singularity that generated space and time as it expanded outward.
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Collective learning:
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The ability of humans to share knowledge through language and to preserve knowledge from generation to generation.
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Cosmology:
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The field of study that tries to explain the origin and evolution of everything in the Universe.
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calendar notation
BCE CE |
Before common era
common era |
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The four fundamental forces WHAT ARE THEY?
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There are four fundamental forces in nature: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force (or weak interaction), and the strong force (or strong interaction).
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Gravity:
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• A force that causes objects with mass to attract one another.
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Electromagnetism:
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•Causes objects of opposite charges to attract and objects of the same charge to repel.
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The weak force (weak interaction):
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• Acts only at short range and is responsible for the radioactive decay of subatomic particles.
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The strong force:
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• It’s responsible for the nuclear fusion that powers stars.
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How is Big History important to me? Why should I care?
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It helps us understand the nature of our complexity, our fragility, and the dangers that we face. But it can also show us our power, as evidenced by our ability for collective learning, which in turn gives us the ability to confront these issues.
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What makes a thing complex?
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Diverse ingredients, precise arrangement and emergent properties.
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What is an emergent property?
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An emergent property is a property that a complex thing exhibits but one that its separate ingredients do not exhibit independently.
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Why are complex things fragile?
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Complex things have more ingredients than simple things, and it takes energy or work to hold them together in their precise arrangement. Over time, when energy is not available for holding the ingredients together, the complex thing will fall apart, or, if it’s a living thing, die.
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What insight does the Second Law of Thermodynamics provide about complexity?
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The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the Universe tends toward disorder, lack of structure, and simplicity. Complex things exhibit order and structure, and they require energy to create and maintain. As a result, complex thing are rarer in the Universe than simple things.
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What are Goldilocks Conditions?
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It’s when the conditions are just right for making them, where there are just the right environments, just the right ingredients, and just the right energy flows.
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What are the 3 characteristics of a threshold of increasing complexity?
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Diverse ingredients, precise arrangement and emergent properties
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Why are thresholds so important to the issues of simplicity and complexity?
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The eight thresholds explain how we went from a simple Universe to the amazing amount of complexity we see around us today.
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How do the thresholds relate to each other?
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Each threshold builds upon the previous one.
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How does the Universe today compare with the early Universe in terms of its complexity?
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The early Universe was simpler because there was nothing. It was a little boring.
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What question about knowledge will the Big History Course ask about every discipline?
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In Big History we ask a very different question: “How did that knowledge set into the textbook?”
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What difference does Bain say distinguishes the questions of textbooks and the questions of scholars?
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Although every discipline is different, all scholars follow similar strategies for discovering or creating ideas.
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What difference does Bain say distinguishes the questions of textbooks and the questions of scholars?What is this process?
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Scholars speculate or make a thoughtful guess about what they’ll learn. They are called “hypothesis”. Scholars need to gather information to answer their questions. Scholars must show how they answered their questions.
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What is a claim?
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Is to say something is true without proof.
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What are the 3 responses that Bain says we make to the claims we hear?
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-Trust
-Ignore -Investigation |
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What are the 4 claim testers and how do they differ from one another?
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-Intuition: gut feeling.
-Authority: relying on credibility of source. -Logic: systematic reasoning. -Evidence: verifiable information. |
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What was Ptolemy’s model of the Universe?
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Ptolemy said that the earth was at the center of the Universe.
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What was Copernicus model of the Universe?
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Copernicus suggested that the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun.
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How was Newton’s model of the Universe different from Copernicus´, Galileo and Kepler?
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Isaac Newton argued that the bodies in the Universe were not fixed to perfect, transparent spheres. Instead, he claimed a mysterious force called gravity, which pervaded the Universe, held them together. He concluded that there were no spheres and no outer edges to the Universe. In fact, he came to believe the Universe was infinitely old and infinitely large.
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How did Hubble’s model of the Universe build upon Newton’s model, one that was accepted for over 200 years?
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Hubble put different techniques all together to make a remarkable discovery. He found that most remote galaxies were moving away from us. Even more important, the farther away they were, the faster they were moving away from us. They newly found evidence suggested that Newton’s model of the Universe was wrong. The Universe wasn’t eternal and infinitely large. Instead, the entire Universe seemed to be expanding.
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As energy congealed, it formed matter. What was this matter? What was the Universe like a second or two after the Big Bang?
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This matter was quarks= protons, neutrons and electrons. The scientists called it a plasma Universe. The Universe is now a mere 10 billion degrees hot. It is still very dense.
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What happened 380,000 years after the Big Bang? Why did this change occur and why is it important?
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380,000 years after the Big Bang the plasma ends. This is a very important sont of mini-threshold for 2 reasons: 1st when the plasma ended you could form atoms, and 2nd the ending of the plasma provided a powerful new piece of evidence for Big Bang cosmology. At a certain temperature, the charges of protons and electrons are powerful enough to bind together and form atoms.
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What were the first atoms to form? How did they form?
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The first 2 types of atoms to form were hydrogen and helium atoms. Hydrogen atoms have one positively charged proton at the center and sometimes a neutron. Helium atoms have 2 positively charged protons and usually 2 neutrons.
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What are some of the questions we still can’t answer about the Big Bang?
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What was there before the Big Bang?
Might these ideas be totally wrong? Why there should be this energy? (Big Bang) Where it could come from? (Big Bang) |
