Cosmology Online

Leonard Susskind, a Stan­ford physi­cist who helped con­cep­tu­al­ize string the­o­ry and has waged a long-run­ning “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawk­ing (see his newish book on that sub­ject) offers a course on Cos­mol­o­gy, which stud­ies the ori­gin and devel­op­ment of the uni­verse. It’s actu­al­ly the fifth course in a larg­er six-course intro­duc­tion to Mod­ern Physics (find them in our col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es). But the course stands on its own, and, along the way, it takes a close look at the Big Bang, the geom­e­try of space-time, infla­tion­ary cos­mol­o­gy, dark mat­ter, dark ener­gy, the string the­o­ry land­scape and more. You can access the full course on YouTube here, and also on iTunes here. Final­ly, the course comes out of Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, which brings engag­ing class­es to the broad­er pub­lic. If you hap­pen to live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area (0r want to take top-notch writ­ing cours­es online), give the pro­gram a look.

PS We’ve got a new cus­tom url for our Face­book page. Check us out at facebook.com/openculture.