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Nature of science:
Cognitive bias: According to everybody’s expectations the rate of expansion of the universe should be slowing down because of gravity. The detailed results from the 1998 (and subsequent) observations on distant supernovae showed that the opposite was in fact true. The accelerated expansion of the universe, whereas experimentally verified, is still an unexplained phenomenon. (3.5)
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Understandings:
- The cosmological principle
- Rotation curves and the mass of galaxies
- Dark matter
- Fluctuations in the CMB
- The cosmological origin of redshift
- Critical density
- Dark energy
Applications and skills:
- Describing the cosmological principle and its role in models of the universe
- Describing rotation curves as evidence for dark matter
- Deriving rotational velocity from Newtonian gravitation
- Describing and interpreting the observed anisotropies in the CMB
- Deriving critical density from Newtonian gravitation
- Sketching and interpreting graphs showing the variation of the cosmic scale factor with time
- Describing qualitatively the cosmic scale factor in models with and without dark energy
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International-mindedness:
- This is a highly collaborative field of research involving scientists from all over the world
Theory of knowledge:
- Experimental facts show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating yet no one understands why. Is this an example of something that we will never know?
Aims:
- Aim 2: unlike how it was just a few decades ago, the field of cosmology has now developed so much that cosmology has become a very exact science on the same level as the rest of physics
- Aim 10: it is quite extraordinary that to settle the issue of the fate of the universe, cosmology, the physics of the very large, required the help of particle physics, the physics of the very small
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