For a universal human experience, we understand very little about time. In this course we will explore how we think about time, how time permeates our culture and how most of our naïve ideas are wrong. We will look at a variety of topics, which are loosely classified under the following headings:

1. Introduction: what you know about Time. 
2. Time and Language: How we talk about time
3. Kairos and Chronos: Time and Stories
4. Stonehenge to Caesium: How we Measure Time
5. Bicycle Pumps and Rice Puddings: Time’s Arrow
6. Going Straight in a Bent Space: How Matter bends Time
7. Grouse, Hurricanes and Dead Cats: How to predict
8. The Beginning and the End of Time
9. “All You Zombies ....”: Time Travel, Good literature and Bad Science

Astronomy really starts with the Babylonians. We will see why, and follow their legacy through the Greeks to the modern ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Newton. The 20^th century bought us a vast variety of new ideas and techniques, such as space probes and totally new kinds of telescopes. This gave us a far more profound understanding of our solar system, ranging from the sun (which provided Canada with a share of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics) to the outermost objects.

This series of talks will carry on where the The First Billion Miles left off. We will step out beyond the solar system, understand stars, galaxies and finally speculate about the origin and fate of universe itself. The oldest written creation myth dates back to the Babylonians, our modern understanding, involving ideas as exotic as dark matter and dark energy, represent the same drive to understand how the universe works.

In this short series of lectures we will look at a variety of topics on the general theme of What is Matter? which are loosely classified under 6 headings. Note these won’t correspond to actual lectures

1. Stones to Alchemy. We'll speculate about the beginnings of our understanding of matter and go from the stone age through the discovery of fire and how our ancestors used it to the beginnings of atomic theory.
2.  Atoms and Fields. Boyle is sometimes called the last alchemist. Dalton is often called the father of modern chemistry; he was certainly the first person to take atoms seriously. Maxwell showed how atoms worked in reality. But Newton, Faraday and Maxwell told us that  fields could exist in empty space
3. The Death of Classical Physics. By the end of the 19th century, we had a wonderful classical theory of physics. Over 20 years it all fell apart. We put it back together with the crazy idea that particles are waves are particles. This is the beginning of Quantum Mechanics: is it for real?
4. How things work. We’ll look at a variety of modern applications. Can we decide if nuclear physics is good, evil or indifferent. Our information revolutions requires new materials, unlike anything that existed 50 years ago, which is why you own many bits of Nobel prizes! We have a host of new materials, starting with  rayon and going to graphene
5. What is fundamental? Physicists have been obsessed with the idea of finding what are the most basic objects. W’ll start by breaking up the atom, then by breaking up the nucleus and end up by breaking the proton. This is sometimes called the Cosmic Onion: how many layers does it have?
6. Why is Nothing Complicated? An ironic view of the progress of  science is shown by the simplest problem we cannot solve. Newton couldn’t solve the 3-body problem. Schrödinger couldn’t solve the 2-body problem. Feynman couldn’t solve the 1-body problem. We can’t solve the zero-body problem: the vacuum is REALLY hard and contains more than we thought possible.