Have you ever wondered what makes up the world we live in? Well look no further -- in this class, we’ll talk about the handful of subatomic particles which make up everything around us. We’ll discuss the four forces of nature -- gravity, electricity and magnetism, as well as the two (strong and weak) nuclear forces -- and we’ll go on to learn that these forces are actually mediated by particles. Finally, we’ll learn about the particles which we don’t see in everyday life, but that are created in collisions at particle accelerators -- and, more importantly, how these new particles have helped us to learn more about the particles making up the world around us.

We're all pretty familiar with light. But it turns out if we think a little harder about some things we've seen, we'll quickly realize that the behavior of light is much more complicated than we'd ever imagined. In this course, we'll look at some familiar optical phenomena in a new light, and in the process, we'll learn some of the big ideas that physicists actually think about when they describe the quantum mechanical world.