Unit Outline
Driving Question: Why do we look at things from far away and close up?
Where did everything come from? How did we get to where we are now? Where do humans fit in? Where are things headed? These are questions that origin stories of different cultures have addressed for thousands of years. Big History attempts to answer them by examining the entire past of the Universe using the best available ideas from disciplines such as astronomy, chemistry, biology and history. Throughout the course, you'll explore different scales of time and space and view human history from new angles. You'll learn what we know and what we don't, consider our place in the Universe, and develop your own ideas for what the future may hold.
Where did everything come from? How did we get to where we are now? Where do humans fit in? Where are things headed? These are questions that origin stories of different cultures have addressed for thousands of years. Big History attempts to answer them by examining the entire past of the Universe using the best available ideas from disciplines such as astronomy, chemistry, biology and history. Throughout the course, you'll explore different scales of time and space and view human history from new angles. You'll learn what we know and what we don't, consider our place in the Universe, and develop your own ideas for what the future may hold.
1.0 - Welcome to Big HistoryBig History starts with the big
picture. Examining Big History’s big ideas from the beginning helps set the stage for the rest of the course. |
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1.1 - ScaleBig History is so big that we
need to use a variety of scales to understand different topics in the course. Looking at things from different temporal and spatial scales helps us do this. |
1.2 - Origin StoriesPeople have always told origin
stories – stories about how the Universe and humans came to be. Big History is a modern, scientific origin story. |
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1.3 - What are Disciplines?Big History enlists scholars
from many disciplines including physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, anthropology, and history to help answer complex questions. |
1.4 - My Big HistoryStudents place themselves in
the Big History narrative by exploring the scale of their own lives, and the core concepts of Goldilocks Conditions and thresholds of increasing complexity are introduced. |
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