UHC Sophomore Course Outline

University Honors College Program Development Committee

One semester of the University Honors College sophomore course consistsof three units, each of which spends four to six weeks exploring practicesof research, invention, and creation in and across three broad overlappingareas. This example semester incorporates units grounded in the disciplinesof physics, history and music. Other units under development encompassengineering, literature, and public health.

Each unit of this team-taughtcourse focuses on a topic that ex-emplifies the modes of inquiry ofa particular discipline or interdisci-plinary area. The course then usesthese units to engage with the va-riety of approaches to research, in-vention, and creation through smallfaculty-led discussion groups, allow-ing for an exploration and compar-ison of how different fields framequestions, conceive knowledge, andapproach creation and discovery.Topics in these discussion sections

provide common themes, such as authority and explanation, that weavethrough the different units.

Units have lectures twice each week, a 2 hour weekly discussion, andincorporate labs, papers, problem sets, exams and other means of instructionand assessment as appropriate. Assignments make use of and further developthe competencies in writing and quantitative reasoning introduced in thefreshman year. Work throughout the semester is maintained through an e-portfolio system allowing for an overall integrated assessment at the end ofthe semester.

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1 Units

1.1 The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)is a 17 mile long underground ringstraddling the French-Swiss borderin which protons collide at extraor-dinarily high energies. Physicistsinvolved with the construction andoperation of this machine, one ofthe largest and most complex ex-periments ever mounted, come fromhundreds of countries, some of themmortal enemies. This unit will use

the example of the LHC to examine the principles and procedures of researchin physics, and will engage with issues such as: What are the questions thatthe LHC is designed to address? Why is this large machine necessary andwhat led to its construction? What are the possible outcomes of the experi-ment? 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, fireand water to quarks and leptons.

2. The Building Blocks of Nature II

Length scales and decoupling: the forces applicable to the cosmos; theforces of everyday life; atomic forces; subatomic physics.

3. Waves vs. Particles

Light as a wave or a particle; diffraction and interference; Young’sexperiment; photoelectric effect.

4. Quantum Mechanics

de Broglie and the wave character of nature; electrons as waves andparticles; electron diffraction.

5. E = mc2

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Relativistic energy and momentum; particle collisions at relativisticmomentum; 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 theW 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, thecharm quark was discovered simultaneously in experiments at Stan-ford, CA and Brookhaven, NY in 1974. But this paper by Glashowand Bjorken is rarely credited with the invention of this quark (excepton Wikipedia). The reason: they introduced the idea on purely æs-thetic grounds. In fact, Bjorken initially withdrew his support fromthis publication, rejecting the aesthetic argument as inappropriate forphysics. Yet the suggestion turned out to be right. Does this vali-date the æsthetic argument? Were there better (i.e. more physical)arguments suggesting the existence of the charm quark? Were exper-iments motivated by the paper of Glashow and Bjorken to search forthis quark?

2. Quark Confinement

In the 1970s one of the most active areas of research in particle physicswas the notion of “confinement”: the idea that “free quarks” (i.e. quarksin isolation) do not exist, but instead all quarks must be “confined”inside larger objects, such as the proton and neutron. Why was thisidea being pursued? Why is it no longer a major research topic inphysics? Why does it remain on the list of major unsolved problemsin mathematics (e.g. the Clay foundation million dollar prizes)?

3. Authority and Explanation

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How is consensus reached in physics? Who or what is the ultimateauthority on the correctness of scientific explanation and theory? Ein-stein created the theory of relativity early last century; when questionsconcerning relativity arise do we turn to Einstein’s papers? Do physi-cists 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 ofquarks and the proliferation of new particles being produced in accel-erators. This theory was a failure, in that it did not correctly describethe results of experiments performed in the mid-70s. But the theorypersists today in a modified form, where it is said to only apply atdistances much shorter than those probed in current experiments, in-cluding the LHC. Can string theory provide a description of nature? Isexperimental 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-suitin federal court in Hawaii to stop the LHC from beginning operations.He argued that there was a significant possibility that the LHC mightproduce a black hole that would destroy the earth. This argument cap-tured the public’s imagination and remains one of the most commonissues raised in public fora and press articles concerning this exper-iment. Is Wagner’s argument valid? How can we assess the risk ofexperiments? How can we ever know the possible outcome of an ex-periment before it is performed?

1.1.3 Assignments and Assessment

• Labs

1. Bubble ChamberConstruct and use a simple bubble chamber to detect and analyzecosmic rays.

2. Electron DiffractionReproduce the classic experiment that demonstrates the wave-nature of the electron.

3. Monte Carlo and Root

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Use the root data analysis system to search for elementary parti-cles in Monte Carlo data simulating the LHC.

• Papers

1. Particle DiscoveryA 5 page paper describing the discovery of an elementary particle.

2. Black Holes and the LHCAn article (in the style appropriate for a newspaper) giving a fairand balanced treatment of the LHC safety issue and potentialdangers of scientific experiments.

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1.2 France During the Nazi Occupation

During and after the Second WorldWar, the French propagated andembraced a national myth that em-phasized heroic resistance againstthe Nazi Occupation. What hap-pened between the fall of France inJune 1940 and the Allied liberationin the summer of 1944, was, how-ever, considerably more complex.The usual dichotomy between col-laboration and resistance, the “goodFrench” and the “bad French,” ig-nores the ambiguities of les annéesnoires, the dark years, in France.This unit introduces the problemsand 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 cen-terpiece of our story is the wartime experience of different individuals andgroups, including the Parisian avant-garde, French and foreign-born Jews,resistance fighters, and Vichy sympathizers. We end with the relationshipbetween history and memory in France from 1944 to the present, with par-ticular emphasis on changing views of wartime collaboration. Focusing ona critical, ominous moment in modern history enables us to explore diversehistorical subfields (political, social, military, economic, cultural, and intel-lectual) and primary sources (memoirs, letters, fiction, film, music, newspa-pers, government records, and architectural monuments). Throughout thelectures and discussions we will emphasize how historians frame problems;how they construct and test narratives; how they evaluate the validity ofdifferent 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 classicstudy by Michael Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews,to more recent scholarship including Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains:

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Daily Life in the Heart of France during the Occupation, Renée Poznanski,Jews in France during World War II, and Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syn-drome: History and Memory in France since 1944. We will spend much ofour time on close reading of a variety of primary materials including selec-tions from Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity, Marc Bloch, StrangeDefeat, Irène Némirovsky, Suite Francaise, Saul Friedlænder, When Mem-ory Comes, The Journal of Hélène Berr, Varian Fry, Surrender on Demand,Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, Gertrude Stein correspon-dence in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, the Mémorial duMartyr 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” explana-tions for historical events or phenomena? What constitutes “progress”in historical thinking? Does more recent scholarship supersede olderworks? Are historical works primarily valuable for the explanatorypower of their theses or the force of their narratives?

2. Structures and Events

In his historical work, Marc Bloch, a resistance fighter who was killedby the Nazis, emphasized the importance of the social sciences (geogra-phy, economics, demography, sociology, etc.) over political history and

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“mere” events. To what extent do “structures” explain the Nazi Occu-pation and to what extent is it best understood in terms of individualchoices?

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 inter-preting the behavior of human actors? How do historians’ politicaland moral commitments shape their respective views of the course ofevents?

4. Evidence

How do historians determine which sources are relevant to understand-ing an event or phenomenon? How do they authenticate or falsifysources?

5. Textual Interpretation

How can works of art such as fiction, painting, architecture, music, andfilm inform historical analyses?

1.2.4 Assignments and Assessment

There will be two 3-5 page papers: The one will compare and contrast twohistorians’ views on wartime collaboration and resistance; the other willanalyze a primary source.

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1.3 The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music

There is a long, and distinguished, corpus ofmusical compositions that, in one way or an-other, make reference to the sounds of na-ture. Antonio Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in E[is entitled (La Tempesta di Mare), the open-ing measures of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony #1carry 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 recentexample is Thrushfield, a twelve minute work for flute, clarinet, violin, cello,piano, percussion, and digital sampler, composed in 2000 by Boston Univer-sity composer Richard Cornell.

This unit provides an insight into the practice of creation, discovery, andinvention in the area of musical composition by focusing on the intersection ofmusical artworks and nature. Its concern lies less with the musical imitationof natural sounds than with the way in which composers make use of “musicalnature”—how the pitches, timbres, and sounds that are the raw material ofmusical composition are manipulated by composers to create works thatcarry musical meaning.

Among the issues to be explored in this unit will be a considerationof the broad array of physical systems that produce those sounds that weunderstand as “music,” the repertoire of tools and techniques that are nowavailable for the analysis of musical sounds, the impact of innovations in theanalysis and the production of musical sounds on compositional practices,and the techniques employed by composers in organizing this material intoworks of art that can claim, in one way or another, to make reference to“nature.”

Listening assignments, drawn from a variety of seminal nineteenth andtwentieth century works (indicated on the lecture schedule below) are anintegral part of the course experience.

1.3.1 Readings

Reading assignments for the course will be drawn from composers’ own writ-ings and also important aesthetic and critical commentary including: HectorBerlioz, A Critical Study of the Beethoven Symphonies (on Symphony #6);Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question (Charles Eliot Norton Lec-

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tures), Lecture 3: Musical Semantics; Karlheinz Stockhausen, The Unity ofMusical Time; John Strawn: The Intégrales of Edgard Varèse: Space, Mass,Element, and Form; Robert Cogan, Sonic Design; Olivier Messiaen, TheTechnique of My Musical Language; James Tenney, A History of Consonanceand Dissonance.

1.3.2 Lectures

1. What’s So “Pastoral” about Beethoven’s Sixth?

Like other artists, musicians have frequently looked to nature for mod-els and materials, deriving rhythmic and pitch motives, growth pro-cesses, and formal principles from observation and interpretation ofnatural phenomena. But in what sense can a musical compositionbe said to be “about” nature? This lecture will explore this issuethrough an examination of one famous musical representation of na-ture: Beethoven’s Symphony #6 (Pastoral).

2. The Mimesis of Natural Processes

An examination of some of the different ways in which composers haveemployed the resources of the modern orchestra to offer stylized rep-resentations of nature (e.g., Claude Debussy’s La Mer, Charles Ives’The Housatonic at Stockbridge, Olivier Messiaen’s Des Canyons auxEtoiles). This lecture will also consider attempts to map natural phe-nomena directly into musical scores (e.g., John Cage’s use of star chartsin his Etudes Australes) and the use of mathematical relationships de-rived from a natural process (e.g Iannis Xenakis, Pithoprakta; BélaBartók, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste) to underpin theformal proportions and the distribution of events in compositions. Fi-nally, it will discuss the ways in which still other composers derive thesubstance and form of their compositions from an understanding of thephysical nature of sound itself (e.g., Gérard Grisey, Périodes; JamesTenney Spectral Canon for Conlon Nancarrow).

3. Musical Materials

An exploration of the physics of sound production, including experi-ments with vibrating systems, waves, and Fourier decomposition. Toolsfor visualizing sound and for its analysis and re-synthesis will also beintroduced.

4. The Morphology of Sound

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A look at different ways of manipulating sounds through processes offiltering and recombination. Topics addressed include harmonic andinharmonic partials, ratios, intervals, consonance-dissonance, ampli-tude and loudness, vowel formants, noise, envelope, wave-length, pe-riod, phase, the time and frequency domains. Finally, considerationwill be given to techniques for the visualization of structure not onlyof individual sonic components, but also of entire formal units of acomposition.

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 thetechnology of keyboards gave to new forms of composition; the impactof new compositions on keyboard design; composers’ transformationsof the sounds of the piano (e.g., John Cage’s pieces for “prepared piano”and George Crumb’s Celestial Mechanics); experiments with player pi-anos (George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique and Colin Nancarrow’s Stud-ies for Prepared Player Piano).

6. Musique Concrète, Synthesizers, and Digital Sampling

The impact of new technologies for the manipulation of sounds, includ-ing experiments with recorded sounds (e.g., Pierre Schaeffer’s Etudeaux Chemins de Fer), the impact of the Studio for Electronic Music(Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge and Edgard Varèse’sPoème Electronique); the advent of digital sampling.

7. Musical Research and the Process of Composition

A discussion of the preparatory stages of musical compositions; the roleof notes and sketches; the collection and analysis of sonic materials;drafts and experiments.

8. Thrushfield

An analysis of the structure, musical rhetoric, and compositional argu-ment of Thrushfield, a serenade for six instruments based on a singlefield recording that the composer transcribed into musical notation andanalyzed. The recording serves as the source of all musical ideas in thecomposition: both thematic and transformational.

1.3.3 Discussions

1. Representation

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What does it mean to say that a musical composition is, in one way oranother, “about nature”? How does the musical representation of na-ture differ from the modes of representation employed in other artisticand 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 for-mal properties of the composition, or in the context of a work’s per-formance?

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 intentionsor the historical context of the composition play? What is the importof aspects of a composition that cannot be heard (e.g., frequenciesoutside the range of human hearing, inscriptions in the score).

4. Innovation, Technology, and Inspiration

How have developments in devices for producing sounds altered thecharacter of the music that composers write? What are the implica-tions of performing music on instruments that did not exist at the timeof 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 composi-tion? In what ways do recent compositional practices (i.e., electronicmusic or aleatory procedures) alter the relationship between a compo-sition and its performance?

1.3.4 Assignments and Assessment

• LabsVisualization and manipulation of sound.

• PaperA 4-5 page paper employing the analytic approaches discussed in thiscourse as applied to one of the assigned compositions.

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