[bioundgrd] SP.726 Doing Experiments: Learning about Nature, History, and ourselves

[Janice Chang]

>SP.726 Doing Experiments: Learning About Nature, History, and Ourselves
>
>Elizabeth Cavicchi Edgerton Center
>Jim Bales Edgerton Center
>U (1-3-2) (P/D/F)
>TF3-5 in 4-409
>Seeing a double shadow; getting shocked by touching a doorknob on a 
>winter's day; a hanging waterdrop's shape: these are things that can 
>surprise and delight us. What is it like to take such an observation 
>further, to probe its behaviors and work out its patterns? This lab 
>course develops our experience as creative investigators. We observe 
>something happening, ask questions, and invent new experiments; 
>doing this extends what we see and think about it. People in the 
>past have also tried to make sense of natural behaviors, often by 
>devising apparatus to measure, amplify, or perturb those effects.
>
>Course activities will include putting ourselves in the place of 
>historical experimenters by reading and redoing something that they 
>did. As a final project, class members (in pairs or small groups) 
>will conduct an investigation using a historical observation or 
>experiment as a resource and stimulus for their own work. Further 
>perspectives on historical experimenting, and our own, will emerge 
>through ongoing class discussions of readings and each other's lab 
>projects. This course will interest students who are intrigued by 
>experimenting, history of science, and themselves as learners. It 
>also offers new perspectives and resources for historians of science 
>and of other disciplines.
>
>For more information, contact Jim Bales, bales at mit.edu.