All language subtitles for 0A3 Intro Selfpaced-en

BRIAN: Hi, I'm Brian Schmidt, an astronomer here at the Australian National University

PAUL: and I'm Paul Francis, and we'd like to welcome you to this course on the Violent

Universe. In this course we're going to go through all the most deadly places

in space, ranging white dwarf stars,

supernovae, novae, pulsars, neutron stars, all the way up to

giant black holes. BRIAN: I love this part of the course, because

I study stars that explode, and figure out how

we can look at the universe itself with these stars, PAUL: and I

study the giant black holes that live in the middles of galaxies, so this is close to both our hearts.

Let's show you how this course is going to work.

PAUL: You will spend most of your time when doing this course in the

Courseware tab, up here. Each week, a new section

will be released, and the two crucial parts of the section are the lesson

and the homework. So here's lesson one, and it consists of

a bunch of videos, interspersed with questions

There are a whole lot of controls below the video which you can play with, for example you can

turn on and off the closed captioning, and you can download

the video and the transcript. If you have any questions about the video,

You can post them right below, where there is a discussion specific to that video.

Or you can go to the discussion tab and post something there. After

each video there will be a question testing what you have learned about the video.

The other important thing in each section is the homework assignment.

and this will consist of

a whole string of questions. In

addition to these compulsory parts of the course, the lesson and the homework, there are also

reference notes, which give you an easy way to check back on the key facts,

there are worked examples, and practice questions, to allow

you to get some practice at doing the homework before you get to the real homework.

And in addition, there is a mystery. Week by week we will build

up the story of a mysterious and different universe, and your job

s to try and find out what's going on here.

For more information

you will see a course guide, syllabus, the combined reference notes and

print-outs of all the transcripts over here on the course information page, and there will also

be regular updates of course news.

BRIAN: To successfully undertake this course, you're going to have to have a

working level understanding of high-school maths and physics.

PAUL: There will be a little bit of calculus in some of the videos, but you won't actually need it to get any

marks, or answer any of the questions. What you will need to do is a lot of what we call

back-of-the-envelope calculations. BRIAN: so a back-of-the-envelope calculation

is where we try to estimate the physics of a problem

to an order of magnitude, just to figure out whether or not it is interesting

to pursue. PAUL: There are two reasons why we do this. One is

to allow us to really focus on the core physics of what's going on

without getting just bogged down in factors of two and Pi and... BRIAN:Yeah, we don't care about factors of

two in astronomy. PAUL: The other reason is that it's a really important

skill, when you are doing almost any research project, you discover something new in space

your first step is to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, you are often sitting in the bar

thinking, could it be this? Could it be that? Quick calculation. Most of the ideas immediately

and then, if you get the few that survive that first step, you can then do the detailed calculation.

BRIAN: So, every day, Paul and I would go through, and when we have an idea

we do the back-of-the-envelope calculation to make sure it was a reasonable idea.

You don't want to waste your life doing things that you know,

in a few seconds with a back-of-the-envelope calculation, are wrong.

PAUL: OK, so now let's start the course.