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Unit 1 Overview: What Is Big History?
Unit 1 Overview: What Is Big History?
What is Big History? Rachel Hansen will be your guide as you travel through the Universe’s 13.8-billion-year history, or what we like to call Big History.
As this video progresses, key ideas will be introduced to invoke discussion.
Think about the following questions as you watch the video
What is the purpose of an origin story?
What are thresholds of increasing complexity?
How does learning about the scientific principles of our Universe fit into a history class?
What is scale switching?
What are the claim testers and why are they important in this course?
Why should we study more than just “recorded history”—all the stuff that came after writing was invented?
: Where do we come from? Where are we going? Who are we?
: If you ever looked up into the sky at night and asked yourself any of these questions, you're not alone.
: I don't have all the answers, unless your question is "Who is that?" which I totally know. I'm Rachel Hansen.
: And while I can't predict the future, I do know that you'll be seeing me nine more times this year
: in each unit overview to learn about something we call Big History.
: Ever since we developed language, humans have been telling each other stories about the origins of the world and our place in it.
: These origin stories all try to do something similar, they seek to tell the listener that
: there's some sense to it all, that the universe has structure, and that we fit into it.
: Different people tell many different stories about the past. In the Big History Project we call them narratives.
: Depending upon what your evidence tells you and which elements you highlight
: your narrative will change. There's no single story about past events that can tell us everything.
: For example, think about the last time you had an argument with a friend.
: Afterward, did you both agree about who was right and who was wrong?
: Did you both remember your fight the exact same way?
: Did you both bring up the same evidence to show that you were right?
: I'm guessing probably not. I'm guessing you both had two very different narratives about that past event.
: That's a small example, but in Big History we have a really big narrative about the universe and our place in it.
: It starts 13.8 billion years ago with the big bang and continues into the distant future.
: To support this narrative we'll be using a lot of historical evidence
: but our narrative starts long before humans even existed.
: So we'll often look to science for our evidence.
: Our course is divided into 10 units you'll see me in an introductory video like this at the beginning of each unit.
: But the narrative of this course is also marked by eight thresholds of increasing complexity,
: or just thresholds. I know! Ten units?! Eight thresholds?! What?!
: But just think of it this way: the ten units are like chapters in a book.
: They divide the big history story into blocks of time
: that will help us organize things.
: The eight thresholds, on the other hand, are crucial turning points in the big history narrative
: when something really big changed.
: Something like the sun was born or living things exist now.
: Some units have multiple thresholds and some have none
: As we move through the 10 units of this course we'll explore these eight thresholds
: of increasing complexity as we try to understand how we got to where we are.
: [instrumental music]
: Oh! It's time for questions from the audience!
: Which is weird, because this is pre-recorded. [laugh track] The first question is
: What's all this science doing in my history class?
: And this one says
: Why do i have to learn history to understand astrophysics?
: Two very good questions from two very inquisitive students.
: Well, in these ten overview videos i'm going to help you answer both of those questions.
: As we move through the course, I'll help you understand how we know what we know.
: And we'll also investigate how people living in many periods have
: changed and deepened their understanding of the universe and everything in it.
: That's the history part. And yes, okay, for a history class it might seem like a
: lot of science talk, but it's still history!
: Science might seem like an unchanging story.
: Stuff like, the law of gravity sound pretty darn permanent, and historians can't change how gravity works.
: [Marker thuds on floor]
: Every time. But, our understanding of gravity can change because we're humans.
: We've got these squishy little brains filled with funny ideas and nagging questions.
: How humans understand and explain the world around us changes all the time.
: And it's changed a ton in the last few thousand years.
: Reshaping how we interact with our world and the stories we tell about our place in it.
: That's why history and science go together like peanut butter and jelly or like flannel and Fridays.
: We think you'll understand humanity's place in this universe better if you learn how we fit in with
: all the supernovae black holes, quarks, and chemical compounds that make it up.
: but we also think you'll understand all those sciency bits a little better if you understand the history of human thought.
: From how our ancestors explain the origins of their world to
: the scientists using a telescope the size of a school bus to peer back in time at the explosive origins of our universe.
: [instrumental music]
: In Unit 1 you're going to learn about some big stuff.
: But you're also going to encounter some teeny tiny stuff like atoms and molecules.
: So, you'll need to learn how to zoom out to identify big patterns and zoom back in to comprehend smaller changes.
: That's called scale switching, and it's an important tool in your historian toolbox.
: Next, you'll dive into some narratives that people in the past have used to explain the
: existence of life, the universe, and everything.
: You'll compare these ancient origin stories with
: the modern scientific origin story offered by Big History.
: Finally, you'll meet historian Bob Bain,
: who will introduce you to one of the most important tools of a historian: claim testing.
: How do we know what we know? And how do we choose which narratives to believe?
: You'll learn how to use intuition, logic, authority, and evidence to evaluate claims made by others.
: Understanding chemistry, astrophysics, forensics, archaeology, and a bunch
: of other schools of thought will give you more evidence to examine historical claims.
: That's another reason we've put all this science in your history class.
: Some historians think of history only in terms of recorded history, meaning that it
: started only five thousand years ago when we started writing things down.
: But look at this.
: This paper clip represents five thousand years. That's all recorded history. All the clay tablets,
: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek plays, Chinese philosophy, all the religious texts ever
: written, all your favorite novels, all the social media posts. It all fits in these 5,000 years.
: In this one inch.
: Get ready for some scale switching.
: I would need 50 paper clips to get to 250,000 years,
: which is how long our species has been on the planet.
: To represent the 4.56 billion years our
: planet has existed, I'd need over 14 miles of paper clips.
: That's longer than the island of manhattan!
: And to reach 13.8 billion years, the age of our universe,
: my paper clip chain would stretch 43.5 miles,
: stretching across the state of Delaware and into the Atlantic ocean.
: That's an awful lot of time that recorded history leaves out.
: If we only pay attention to what's been written down we lose a lot of the rich diversity of human experience.
: We also miss the connections between our universe, solar system, planet, and us.
: comprehending the origins of the universe requires the tools of chemistry and physics and a bunch of other disciplines.
: But we'll also need the tools of the historian like scale switching and claim testing
: if we're going to understand how we know what we know and why that matters.
: Okay that's 1,000 paper clips just 2 million 759,000 more to go to get to 43 and a half miles.
: It's gonna be a long night.
: Hey! I'm clipping here!
: What?! We can do the paper clip thing with CGI?!
: Well, that would have been nice to know about 999 paperclips ago.