Quantum World
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The lecture begins with a continued discussion of the Cartesian argument and its weaknesses. The lecture then turns to Plato's metaphysical views in the context of his work, Phaedo. The key point in the discussion is the idea that in addition to the ordinary empirical world that we are familiar with, we posit the existence of a second realm in which the Platonic forms exist. These forms are the abstract properties that we attribute to phys...more
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In this lecture, Professor Donald Kagan explores the rise, fall, and significance of tyrannies in the Greek polis. He argues that the various tyrannies in the Greek world had both negative and positive aspects, which need to be appreciated. For instance, on the one hand, tyrannies promoted economic, commercial and artistic advances. On the other hand, tyrannies ruled absolutely and curbed the freedom of the polis. Finally, Professor Kaga...more
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This lecture examines Inferno IV -VII. Dante's Limbo, modeled on the classical locus amoenus, is identified as a place of repose and vulnerability. Here, in fact, among the poets of antiquity, the pilgrim falls prey to poetic hubris by joining in their ranks. The pilgrim is faced with the consequences of his poetic vocation when he descends to the circle of lust (Inferno V), where Francesca da Rimini, in her failure to distinguish romance ...more
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How did a small group following an apocalyptic prophet in Palestine become Christianity - what is now called a "world religion"? This small movement saw many changes in the second, third, and fourth centuries, from the development of different sects, philosophical theologies, and martyrology, to the rise of monasticism, and finally to the ascension of Constantine to the throne and the Christian Roman Empire. It was not until the nineteenth...more
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In this lecture, Professor Donald Kagan explores the earliest history of Greek civilization. He demonstrates how small agricultural enclaves eventually turned into great cities of power and wealth in the Bronze Age, taking as his examples first Minoan Crete and then Mycenaean Greece. He also argues that these civilizations were closely related to the great monarchies of the ancient Near East. He points out that the Mycenaean age eventually...more
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In this lecture, Professor Kagan addresses what scholars call the Homeric question. He asks: what society do Homer's poems describe? He argues that in view of the long oral transmission of the poems, the poems of Homer probably reflect various ages from the Mycenaean world to the Dark Ages. More importantly, close scrutiny of the poems will yield historical information for the historian. In this way, one is able to reconstruct through the ...more
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As a result of World War I, Europe had a different understanding of war in the twentieth century than the United States. One of the most important ways in which the First World War was experienced on the continent and in Britain was through commemoration. By means of both mass-media technologies and older memorial forms, sites of memory offered opportunities for personal as well as political reconciliation with the unprecedented consequenc...more
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This lecture is devoted to discussion of the wonderful Quantum world. Classical Mechanics, in spite of all of its impressive predictive power, fails to explain many microscopic behaviors. This led to the development of Quantum Mechanics, where electrons orbit nuclei in discrete energy levels, light can behave as a particle, and particles behave as waves. The location of microscopic particles can only be expressed in terms of probabilities....more
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This course is a first-semester freshman physics class in Newtonian Mechanics, Fluid Mechanics, and Kinetic Gas Theory. In addition to the basic concepts a variety of interesting topics are covered in this course: Binary Stars, Neutron Stars, Black Holes, Resonance Phenomena, Musical Instruments, Stellar Collapse, Supernovae, Astronomical observations from very high flying balloons (lecture 35), and you will be allowed a peek into the intr...more
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The human cost of World War I cannot be understood only in terms of demographics. To better understand the consequences of the war upon both soldiers and civilians it is necessary to consider mourning in its private, as well as its public dimensions. Indeed, for many French people who lived through the war, public spectacles of bereavement, such as the Unknown Soldier, were also conceived of as intensely private affairs. Both types of mour...more
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Entrepreneurs are far less successful when they are trying to make money--they are much more successful when they have a mission to change the world. No matter what you do, Khosla says, you have to be foolish to do what an entrepreneur attempts. Whatever your value proposition is, it should have the goal of making the world a better place and you should feel passionately about your contribution. If you don't have this and you run into an o...more
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The history of the world (eventually).
