Sunday, June 10, 2012

Finished (Audiobook) - The Great Courses "The Big History"

Started some of "The Great Courses" university-level courses in various topics given by lecturers who've been recognized as excellent instructors in their field.

"The Big History" was a very nice course to start with.  The idea of "Big History" is to start with the Big Bang and go forward.  Typical history is very writing-oriented - where history can be pegged to named individuals with precise (or reasonably precise) dates.  From the "Big History" perspective, this is a kind of "pro-writing" bias, where many significant events (in fact THE significant events) are pre-historical in the classic sense.

Going through the eons in this course provides a nice overview of the sciences, from physics through chemistry, geology, seismology...  In fact, the history of the sciences themselves was interesting: the initial universe only has physics, as there was only hydrogen and helium atoms - when stars began to coalesce, there was a start of chemistry, which much later let to biology and later social sciences - each level increased complexity over the last.

I'd recommend this course, particularly as an overview to a large number of sciences - cosmology, plate techtonics, human evolution, politics, history...

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