Description

Class Summary

What is a day? The answer is more complicated than “the time it takes the earth to rotate once on its axis.” The same is true for the definition of the year. While civil timekeeping is now based on atomic clocks, for thousands of years humans relied on the motion of objects in the solar system – observed as the motion of the sun, moon, stars, and planets across the sky – to keep track of the passage of time. We’ll explore how the many motions of the earth, sun, and moon through the universe have given rise to various systems of timekeeping, and the many hoops we need to jump through in order to keep everything in sync.

About the Instructor

Jeremy Carlo, Ph.D., is an associate professor of physics at Villanova University. He earned his undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in physics at Columbia University. His research involves “quantum materials” in which quantum mechanical interactions determine their magnetic and electronic behavior.