ESP Biography

Cancer kills more people than anything else in the developed world. Ironically, this deadly disease usually comes not from an external invader, but from our own cells' betrayal. We will discuss the elegant principles behind cancer: how it develops, how it kills, and how it might be cured. We will also practice being cancer researchers, interpreting results of real experiments.

Kissing: what is it? Why do people do it? How ought it be done? We will examine these and other profound questions in a 45 minute class studying the history and development of the kiss, the top 10 kisses in cinema and literature, and good kissing technique.

How will robots take over the world? Why might you not really have cancer? Why is Google such an awesome search engine? The answer to all three questions is found in Bayes' Rule, a phenomenally important and simple mathematical law that they never teach you in high school. We will learn about its derivation, its meaning, and its applications; come join us to learn about life, death, and probability.

We will watch scenes from The Matrix and then have a debate about the film's major philosophical question: what is the good life? Is it best to pursue a life of sensual pleasures, or to pursue higher things, like truth or love? Is it more important to be free or happy? We will consider these questions in light of the teachings of major philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes.

Lagrangian mechanics may make you believe in God. It begins with the principle that everything in the universe chooses the cheapest action--objects, for example, somehow choose the shortest path through spacetime. It's as though they're guided by a very lazy God. How do they know how to do this? The answer is elegant, spooky, and astonishingly useful, a principle that unifies many different areas and forms the basis for much of modern physics. We will look at its applications in Newtonian mechanics and discuss its applications in modern physics.