UHC Sophomore Course Outline University Honors College Program Development Committee One semester of the University Honors College sophomore course consists of three units, each of which spends four to six weeks exploring practices of research, invention, and creation in and across three broad overlapping areas. This example semester incorporates units grounded in the disciplines of physics, history and music. Other units under development encompass engineering, literature, and public health. Each unit of this team-taught course focuses on a topic that exemplifies the modes of inquiry of a particular discipline or interdisciplinary area. The course then uses these units to engage with the variety of approaches to research, invention, and creation through small faculty-led discussion groups, allowing for an exploration and comparison of how different fields frame questions, conceive knowledge, and approach creation and discovery. Topics in these discussion sections provide common themes, such as authority and explanation, that weave through the different units. Units have lectures twice each week, a 2 hour weekly discussion, and incorporate labs, papers, problem sets, exams and other means of instruction and assessment as appropriate. Assignments make use of and further develop the competencies in writing and quantitative reasoning introduced in the freshman year. Work throughout the semester is maintained through an e- portfolio system allowing for an overall integrated assessment at the end of the semester. 1
1 Units 1.1 The Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a 17 mile long underground ring straddling the French-Swiss border in which protons collide at extraordinarily high energies. Physicists involved with the construction and operation of this machine, one of the largest and most complex experiments ever mounted, come from hundreds of countries, some of them mortal enemies. This unit will use the example of the LHC to examine the principles and procedures of research in physics, and will engage with issues such as: What are the questions that the LHC is designed to address? Why is this large machine necessary and what led to its construction? What are the possible outcomes of the experiment? How does the LHC relate to other areas of physical science? 1.1.1 Lectures 1. The Building Blocks of Nature I The constituents of matter and their interactions: from earth, air, fire and water to quarks and leptons. 2. The Building Blocks of Nature II Length scales and decoupling: the forces applicable to the cosmos; the forces of everyday life; atomic forces; subatomic physics. 3. Waves vs. Particles Light as a wave or a particle; diffraction and interference; Young s experiment; photoelectric effect. 4. Quantum Mechanics de Broglie and the wave character of nature; electrons as waves and particles; electron diffraction. 5. E = mc 2 2
Relativistic energy and momentum; particle collisions at relativistic momentum; probing the interior of the proton; particle creation. 6. Subatomic Microscopes Optical microscopes; electron microscopes; particle colliders. 7. The Standard Model I: The weak interactions, radioactivity and the W and Z particles. 8. The Standard Model II: Weaknesses and failures; the origin of mass; the Higgs. 9. The LHC: Speculation and experiment. 1.1.2 Discussions 1. The Charm Quark Proposed in a paper by S.L. Glashow and J.D. Bjorken in 1964, the charm quark was discovered simultaneously in experiments at Stanford, CA and Brookhaven, NY in 1974. But this paper by Glashow and Bjorken is rarely credited with the invention of this quark (except on Wikipedia). The reason: they introduced the idea on purely æsthetic grounds. In fact, Bjorken initially withdrew his support from this publication, rejecting the aesthetic argument as inappropriate for physics. Yet the suggestion turned out to be right. Does this validate the æsthetic argument? Were there better (i.e. more physical) arguments suggesting the existence of the charm quark? Were experiments motivated by the paper of Glashow and Bjorken to search for this quark? 2. Quark Confinement In the 1970s one of the most active areas of research in particle physics was the notion of confinement : the idea that free quarks (i.e. quarks in isolation) do not exist, but instead all quarks must be confined inside larger objects, such as the proton and neutron. Why was this idea being pursued? Why is it no longer a major research topic in physics? Why does it remain on the list of major unsolved problems in mathematics (e.g. the Clay foundation million dollar prizes)? 3. Authority and Explanation 3
How is consensus reached in physics? Who or what is the ultimate authority on the correctness of scientific explanation and theory? Einstein created the theory of relativity early last century; when questions concerning relativity arise do we turn to Einstein s papers? Do physicists even read or refer to these papers? 4. Strings and a Theory of Everything In the early 1970s a theory was proposed to explain the confinement of quarks and the proliferation of new particles being produced in accelerators. This theory was a failure, in that it did not correctly describe the results of experiments performed in the mid-70s. But the theory persists today in a modified form, where it is said to only apply at distances much shorter than those probed in current experiments, including the LHC. Can string theory provide a description of nature? Is experimental confirmation required? Is it physics? Is it even science? 5. Will the LHC destroy the earth? In 2008 Walter Wagner, a retired nuclear safety officer, filed a law-suit in federal court in Hawaii to stop the LHC from beginning operations. He argued that there was a significant possibility that the LHC might produce a black hole that would destroy the earth. This argument captured the public s imagination and remains one of the most common issues raised in public fora and press articles concerning this experiment. Is Wagner s argument valid? How can we assess the risk of experiments? How can we ever know the possible outcome of an experiment before it is performed? 1.1.3 Assignments and Assessment Labs 1. Bubble Chamber Construct and use a simple bubble chamber to detect and analyze cosmic rays. 2. Electron Diffraction Reproduce the classic experiment that demonstrates the wavenature of the electron. 3. Monte Carlo and Root 4
Papers Use the root data analysis system to search for elementary particles in Monte Carlo data simulating the LHC. 1. Particle Discovery A 5 page paper describing the discovery of an elementary particle. 2. Black Holes and the LHC An article (in the style appropriate for a newspaper) giving a fair and balanced treatment of the LHC safety issue and potential dangers of scientific experiments. 5
1.2 France During the Nazi Occupation During and after the Second World War, the French propagated and embraced a national myth that emphasized heroic resistance against the Nazi Occupation. What happened between the fall of France in June 1940 and the Allied liberation in the summer of 1944, was, however, considerably more complex. The usual dichotomy between collaboration and resistance, the good French and the bad French, ignores the ambiguities of les années noires, the dark years, in France. This unit introduces the problems and methods of historical research and writing by analyzing French culture and society during the Occupation. We begin with what historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch called the strange defeat of the French military by the German invaders. The centerpiece of our story is the wartime experience of different individuals and groups, including the Parisian avant-garde, French and foreign-born Jews, resistance fighters, and Vichy sympathizers. We end with the relationship between history and memory in France from 1944 to the present, with particular emphasis on changing views of wartime collaboration. Focusing on a critical, ominous moment in modern history enables us to explore diverse historical subfields (political, social, military, economic, cultural, and intellectual) and primary sources (memoirs, letters, fiction, film, music, newspapers, government records, and architectural monuments). Throughout the lectures and discussions we will emphasize how historians frame problems; how they construct and test narratives; how they evaluate the validity of different types of evidence; how they interpret sources, including literature, film, and art; and how they deal with moral issues. 1.2.1 Readings Sources will include selections from secondary works ranging from the classic study by Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, to more recent scholarship including Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: 6
Daily Life in the Heart of France during the Occupation, Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, and Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. We will spend much of our time on close reading of a variety of primary materials including selections from Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity, Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat, Irène Némirovsky, Suite Francaise, Saul Friedlænder, When Memory Comes, The Journal of Hélène Berr, Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand, Olivier Messiaen s Quartet for the End of Time, Gertrude Stein correspondence in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, the Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu (Paris), and government records. 1.2.2 Lectures 1. Strange Defeat? 2. The New Regime 3. Collaboration and Resistance I 4. Collaboration and Resistance II 5. Art and Politics 6. The War Against the Jews 7. Nazi Art Looting 8. Aftermath: Liberation and Restitution 9. History and Memory 1.2.3 Discussions 1. Authority and Explanation What constitutes an argument in history? Are there final explanations for historical events or phenomena? What constitutes progress in historical thinking? Does more recent scholarship supersede older works? Are historical works primarily valuable for the explanatory power of their theses or the force of their narratives? 2. Structures and Events In his historical work, Marc Bloch, a resistance fighter who was killed by the Nazis, emphasized the importance of the social sciences (geography, economics, demography, sociology, etc.) over political history and 7
mere events. To what extent do structures explain the Nazi Occupation and to what extent is it best understood in terms of individual choices? 3. Point of View How do historians points of view inform or distort their accounts? What problems are inherent in a field based on human actors interpreting the behavior of human actors? How do historians political and moral commitments shape their respective views of the course of events? 4. Evidence How do historians determine which sources are relevant to understanding an event or phenomenon? How do they authenticate or falsify sources? 5. Textual Interpretation How can works of art such as fiction, painting, architecture, music, and film inform historical analyses? 1.2.4 Assignments and Assessment There will be two 3-5 page papers: The one will compare and contrast two historians views on wartime collaboration and resistance; the other will analyze a primary source. 8
1.3 The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music There is a long, and distinguished, corpus of musical compositions that, in one way or another, make reference to the sounds of nature. Antonio Vivaldi s Violin Concerto in E is entitled (La Tempesta di Mare), the opening measures of Gustav Mahler s Symphony #1 carry the instruction Like a sound of nature, the twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen was an avid collector of bird songs, and Beethoven s Symphony #6 makes reference to brooks, birds, and thunderstorms. A more recent example is Thrushfield, a twelve minute work for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion, and digital sampler, composed in 2000 by Boston University composer Richard Cornell. This unit provides an insight into the practice of creation, discovery, and invention in the area of musical composition by focusing on the intersection of musical artworks and nature. Its concern lies less with the musical imitation of natural sounds than with the way in which composers make use of musical nature how the pitches, timbres, and sounds that are the raw material of musical composition are manipulated by composers to create works that carry musical meaning. Among the issues to be explored in this unit will be a consideration of the broad array of physical systems that produce those sounds that we understand as music, the repertoire of tools and techniques that are now available for the analysis of musical sounds, the impact of innovations in the analysis and the production of musical sounds on compositional practices, and the techniques employed by composers in organizing this material into works of art that can claim, in one way or another, to make reference to nature. Listening assignments, drawn from a variety of seminal nineteenth and twentieth century works (indicated on the lecture schedule below) are an integral part of the course experience. 1.3.1 Readings Reading assignments for the course will be drawn from composers own writings and also important aesthetic and critical commentary including: Hector Berlioz, A Critical Study of the Beethoven Symphonies (on Symphony #6); Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Charles Eliot Norton Lec- 9
tures), Lecture 3: Musical Semantics; Karlheinz Stockhausen, The Unity of Musical Time; John Strawn: The Intégrales of Edgard Varèse: Space, Mass, Element, and Form; Robert Cogan, Sonic Design; Olivier Messiaen, The Technique of My Musical Language; James Tenney, A History of Consonance and Dissonance. 1.3.2 Lectures 1. What s So Pastoral about Beethoven s Sixth? Like other artists, musicians have frequently looked to nature for models and materials, deriving rhythmic and pitch motives, growth processes, and formal principles from observation and interpretation of natural phenomena. But in what sense can a musical composition be said to be about nature? This lecture will explore this issue through an examination of one famous musical representation of nature: Beethoven s Symphony #6 (Pastoral). 2. The Mimesis of Natural Processes An examination of some of the different ways in which composers have employed the resources of the modern orchestra to offer stylized representations of nature (e.g., Claude Debussy s La Mer, Charles Ives The Housatonic at Stockbridge, Olivier Messiaen s Des Canyons aux Etoiles). This lecture will also consider attempts to map natural phenomena directly into musical scores (e.g., John Cage s use of star charts in his Etudes Australes) and the use of mathematical relationships derived from a natural process (e.g Iannis Xenakis, Pithoprakta; Béla Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste) to underpin the formal proportions and the distribution of events in compositions. Finally, it will discuss the ways in which still other composers derive the substance and form of their compositions from an understanding of the physical nature of sound itself (e.g., Gérard Grisey, Périodes; James Tenney Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow). 3. Musical Materials An exploration of the physics of sound production, including experiments with vibrating systems, waves, and Fourier decomposition. Tools for visualizing sound and for its analysis and re-synthesis will also be introduced. 4. The Morphology of Sound 10
A look at different ways of manipulating sounds through processes of filtering and recombination. Topics addressed include harmonic and inharmonic partials, ratios, intervals, consonance-dissonance, amplitude and loudness, vowel formants, noise, envelope, wave-length, period, phase, the time and frequency domains. Finally, consideration will be given to techniques for the visualization of structure not only of individual sonic components, but also of entire formal units of a composition. 5. A Brief History of Keyboards A survey of the transformation of keyboard instruments (clavichords, harpsichords, the piano forte) and the impetus that innovations in the technology of keyboards gave to new forms of composition; the impact of new compositions on keyboard design; composers transformations of the sounds of the piano (e.g., John Cage s pieces for prepared piano and George Crumb s Celestial Mechanics); experiments with player pianos (George Antheil s Ballet Mécanique and Colin Nancarrow s Studies for Prepared Player Piano). 6. Musique Concrète, Synthesizers, and Digital Sampling The impact of new technologies for the manipulation of sounds, including experiments with recorded sounds (e.g., Pierre Schaeffer s Etude aux Chemins de Fer), the impact of the Studio for Electronic Music (Karlheinz Stockhausen s Gesang der Jünglinge and Edgard Varèse s Poème Electronique); the advent of digital sampling. 7. Musical Research and the Process of Composition A discussion of the preparatory stages of musical compositions; the role of notes and sketches; the collection and analysis of sonic materials; drafts and experiments. 8. Thrushfield An analysis of the structure, musical rhetoric, and compositional argument of Thrushfield, a serenade for six instruments based on a single field recording that the composer transcribed into musical notation and analyzed. The recording serves as the source of all musical ideas in the composition: both thematic and transformational. 1.3.3 Discussions 1. Representation 11
What does it mean to say that a musical composition is, in one way or another, about nature? How does the musical representation of nature differ from the modes of representation employed in other artistic and scholarly endeavors? 2. Meaning What makes music meaningful? Does meaning lie in particular sounds (e.g., imitations of bird songs or other sounds of nature?), in the formal properties of the composition, or in the context of a work s performance? 3. Authority and Explanation What are the relevant criteria for interpreting musical compositions? What role, if any, do such factors as the composer s stated intentions or the historical context of the composition play? What is the import of aspects of a composition that cannot be heard (e.g., frequencies outside the range of human hearing, inscriptions in the score). 4. Innovation, Technology, and Inspiration How have developments in devices for producing sounds altered the character of the music that composers write? What are the implications of performing music on instruments that did not exist at the time of a work s composition (e.g., Bach on a modern concert grand)? 5. Interpretation and Performance What is the role of performance in understanding a musical composition? In what ways do recent compositional practices (i.e., electronic music or aleatory procedures) alter the relationship between a composition and its performance? 1.3.4 Assignments and Assessment Labs Visualization and manipulation of sound. Paper A 4-5 page paper employing the analytic approaches discussed in this course as applied to one of the assigned compositions. 12