Explore the monumental "story of everything" with this exciting course that weaves many disciplines into one grand narrative beginning with the big bang and ending with a look into our future.
Is it possible to tell a story of everything, from the big bang up to the present day? This episode introduces the background and unique aspects of this broad, multidisciplinary perspective on history.
Most history series cover time spans of a few decades or a few centuries, but big history requires us to survey the past over scales that span billions of years. This episode explores ways to become more familiar with the immense scales needed to cover the modern creation story.
In this episode, we introduce one of the unifying themes of the series: the development of increasing complexity since the creation of the Universe. Here, we'll examine the definition of complexity and ask how our Universe builds more complex entities.
Why should we trust the claims of modern science about events in the distant past? This episode lays some ground rules about evidence for proving scientific claims and describes how new dating techniques have allowed scientists to peer further back into the past than previously thought possible.
We encounter the first threshold of complexity (the creation of the Universe at the moment of the big bang) and explore the scientific evidence that allows us to piece together this ever-evolving story of creation.
This episode surveys the history of different ideas about the creation of the Universe, from Ptolemaic theories of an Earth-centered cosmos to the modern notion of a constantly expanding Universe.
How did the Universe change from a cloud of dust to a constellation of stellar bodies? This episode describes how gravity was fundamental in crossing the second threshold of the series: the creation of stars and galaxies from huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms.
Stars created the preconditions for crossing a third threshold of complexity: the formation of chemical elements. As stars collapse and die, they fuse to create new atoms that are the building blocks of all the complex chemicals that make up our Earth.
With this episode, we shift from the scale of the Universe to that of our solar system. Here we examine the processes by which planets and solar systems are created and the evidence that helps us piece together this part of the story.
The tumultuous early history of the Earth is presented in this episode, including the development of our planet's internal layers, the generation of its magnetic field, the creation of the first seas, and the appearance of its early atmosphere.
