The course will explore ideas and tools that help us to conceptualize and quantify time. Measurement of time has been accomplished by careful observation of celestial objects, counting growth rings in trees, or determining the abundance of radioactive decay products, and with devices as varied as the hour glass and the atomic clock. A thorough investigation of these and other methods and tools will illuminate old and new views of time and will allow us to venture into various fields of physics such as classical mechanics, the theory of relativity, atomic and nuclear physics, electricity, and optics. Along the way, we will discuss concepts including, but not limited to (and not in that order), the origin of time, its smoothness, time dilation, the relativity of simultaneity, and the direction of time's arrow. |