Splash Biography
STEPHEN CHEN, ESP Teacher
|
Major: Physics College/Employer: UC Berkeley Year of Graduation: G |
|
Brief Biographical Sketch:
Not Available. Past Classes(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)S576: Measuring the Heavens: from Aristarchus to Redshift in Splash Spring 19 (Mar. 16, 2019)
How far away are the sun and the moon, and who told the Greeks?
In this class we will discuss how the Greeks learned to take their tape measures to the sky without leaving the atmosphere, and how scientists are now using the same ideas to study everything from the expansion of the universe to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.
S334: Measuring the Heavens: Or, How the Greeks Figured Out the Distance to the Sun in Splash Spring 18 (Mar. 04, 2018)
You've heard that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, the black hole at the center of the galaxy is a hundred thousand light years away, and light takes eight minutes to reach us from the sun.
But how do we know any of this? Well, a few clever Greeks figured out how to take a tape measure to the heavens. With the help of a little geometry, we will too!
|
|