news, events, and commentary from the Arts & Sciences Core Curriculum
September 22, 2014 at 4:08 pm
Faculty, despite cruel rumors to the contrary, are not all corrupted by the Gradgrindian spirit. Indeed, they are warm people, who love nothing more than to see their former students thriving in the world beyond campus. To that end, they love visits.
In this photo, from September 2014, Professors Ann Vasaly, Stephen Esposito and Stephanie Nelson are seen visiting alumna XO LtCdr Emily Bassett (née Klauser) on the USS Arlington. Fantastic. #corealumlove #showusyourtriremes
September 19, 2014 at 11:03 am
Above, a snippet from Prof. Thomas Barfield's very animated lecture (babba-bing!) on Thomas Hobbes, in September 2014 for the students of CC 203: Foundations of the Social Sciences.
September 16, 2014 at 10:24 am
Howdy "ya'll"!
ONE WEEK
and I'll be back in Boston. I hope all of you are doing well and I can't wait to see you all! Winona
Geia sas, Core office!
Greetings from Greece!
We went here on Sunday! Watched Prof. Samons "frolick" gleefully. Thank you for the opportunity.
With love,
The BU Phillhellenes 2014
Lovliest Core office,
Greetings from Praha! Maddy and I are spending a week here during our vacation from summer study abroad with Radhika. I've had an amazing time this summer, mostly because of the awesome people Core has put me in touch with. I've seen so much of the country that was the origin of so many Core texts now. Travel is an essential part of any well-rounded education - it makes the history come alive! One of my favorite things I've done so far is see Austen's writing desk in the British Library. Another, more Prague-related, was the Kafka Museum along the Vltava River, and seeing a house where he lived! What a grand summer. I miss the office and hope to see you all soon, Corey xx
September 12, 2014 at 9:47 am
This past Tuesday, September 9th, Prof. Michael Zank of the Department of Religion lectured to students in the first-year Humanities about the Hebrew Bible. His talk was introduced with some very moving comments by Prof. Stephen Esposito (Classics), the course coordinator. Prof. Esposito has agreed to let us republish his introduction here on the Core blog, for the benefit of alumni and other readers. Here they are.
September 10, 2014 at 9:11 am
As you know, Core is more than a set of classes—it is also a community, whose members are the students, faculty, and alumni that have all shared experiences in and outside of those classrooms. One of the things that happens in a community is that people stay in touch. In keeping with this, we’re going to be posting updates of recent news sent in to us by students, alumni, and instructors: announcements of new jobs or marriages, interesting trips, recent accomplishments, and current projects. Read More
September 8, 2014 at 10:54 am
{ A guest post from Prof. James Uden of the Department of Classics; cross-posted from the Classics departmental homepage. }
Group Dinner in Athens
Do Athenians ever sleep? No doubt many of the BU students who spent a month in Athens this summer were already accustomed to staying up late, but the Greeks really showed them how to make the best use of the nighttime hours. Combing the night markets during the name day festival of Saint Paraskevi, watching Euripides’ ‘Helen’ by moonlight in the ancient theatre at Epidaurus, holding long conversations in restaurants and in the dorms about Greek, and then, word by word, in Greek – these were some of the ways our BU undergraduates spent their Attic nights, in a city that stays wide awake once the sun goes down. Read More
September 2, 2014 at 7:38 am
Students just entering the first-year Humanities haven't yet encountered the Divine Comedy of Dante in the Core classroom... but for sure, they won't forget it. Many Core alumni report that their exploration of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso in seminar with their Core classmates was a formative part of their undergraduate experience. Accordingly, we keep our eyes open for any mention of our man Dante in the world of letters beyond BU.
Here's the latest clip. Over in the estimable Paris Review, in an essay titled "The Great Unread", Joseph Luzzi asks the question: "Why do some classics continue to fascinate while others gather dust?" In the following excerpt, he explains the reason Dante's great work didn't go the way of so many texts lost to the modern reader in the dust-bin of literary history:
In 1756, Voltaire proclaimed “nobody reads Dante anymore,” and indeed the Enlightenment had little time for Dante’s religious allegories and Christian doctrine. He was about to go the way of Manzoni’s Betrothed: a classic that was once much admired but now rarely read. Then the Romantics came along and rediscovered Dante, celebrating his individuality and heroism—those same qualities from Inferno that Dante would reject in Paradiso. But that didn’t matter to the Romantics. They creatively misread Dante, and in so doing made him the literary touchstone he is today. Our interest in Dante’s hell, the universality of its concern with questions of justice and crime and punishment, overrides our indifference to his medieval vision of Christianity.
What do you think -- is this a plausible and sufficient explanation of the enduring success of the Divine Comedy? A cynical (non-Core) explanation for why some books stick around and some books are forgotten is: The books that stick around are the ones the professors put on the reading list. There's a dismissive truth to that explanation, but Core people know there's a lot more to the matter than this kind of pat answer can supply.
Read the rest of Luzzi's essay at The Paris Review, and learn more about its author at josephluzzi.com.
August 5, 2014 at 5:20 pm
These "Analects of Professor Nelson" were recorded during class discussion by Core student Matthew Spencer, and published in The Journal of the Core Curriculum, Vol. IX, Spring 2000:
August 3, 2014 at 2:23 pm
Robin Thicke's hit song "Blurred Lines" has made quite the stir in the past year, prompting outcry generally saved for Southern politicians' stances on birth control or gay marriage. Despite all this controversy over intentions, the tune and its marked "Hey, hey, hey"s is catchy, a fact that fills many a forward thinking person with guilt; to our combined relief, "Weird Al" Yankovic has provided a solution. Now, the same tune has been put to different, more Core related lyrics. Instead of "Blurred Lines" we now have "Word Crimes", a spunky song outcrying the dastardly degradation of grammar and syntax on the internet. This song, besides reminding the general public to stay away from lazy one-letter words and "to who"s also cautions against the incorrect use of the world literally. Even the oxford comma makes an appearance. From Thicke's blurred lines to Yankovic's clear grammatical laws, this tune has definitely taken a turn for the better.
So here it is, the guilt free grammar song the features dancing punctuation, not mostly naked women. Enjoy and let us know what you think.
July 21, 2014 at 9:51 am
The Big Bang theory was first conceived nearly a century ago. For many people, it seems to explain how the universe came to be. For cosmologists, however, it opens up many more questions. Neil Swidey of the Boston Globe writes, "The Big Bang theory offers an explanation for how the early universe expanded and cooled and how matter congealed, from a primordial soup into stars, planets, and galaxies. What it describes, then, is the aftermath of the Bang. But it is effectively silent on why or how that first massive expansion happened or where all the original matter came from."
MIT professor Alan Guth has spent the past three decades hypothesizing about "what banged, why it banged, [and] what happened before it banged". As a postdoctoral student, Guth developed the inflation theory, the "exponential expansion of the universe within its first fraction of a second", which provided a solution to several major problems with the big bang theory - the monopole problem, the flatness problem and the horizon problem. Swidey explains the theory in everyday-English:
At extremely high energies, there are forms of matter that upend everything we learned about gravity in high school. Rather than being the ultimate force of attraction that Newton and his falling apple taught us, gravity in this case is an incredibly potent force of repulsion. And that repulsive gravity was the fuel that powered the Big Bang.
The universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old, and it began from a patch of material packed with this repulsive gravity. The patch was... one 100-billionth the size of a single proton. But the repulsive gravity was like a magic wand, doubling the patch in size every tenth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. And it waved its doubling power over the patch about 100 times in a row, until it got to the size of that marble. All that happened within a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. As a point of comparison, the smallest fraction of time that the average human can detect is about one-tenth of a second.
The ingredients of what would become our entire observable universe were packed inside that marble. While the density of ordinary material being put through that kind of exponential expansion would thin out to almost nothing, a quirk of this repulsive-gravity material allowed it to maintain a constant density as it kept growing. But at a certain point — while the universe was still a tiny fraction of a second old — inflation ended. That happened because the repulsive-gravity material was unstable, and, like a radioactive substance, it began to decay. As it decayed, it released energy that produced ordinary particles, which in turn formed the dense, hot “primordial soup.”
The theory turned Guth into a celebrity in the scientific world and landed him a professorship at MIT but at the time it proved impossible to collect observational evidence to support the theory.
Until this past March when astrophysicist John Kovak and his multi-institution team were able to come up with "rock-solid" evidence to back Guth's theory. In 2006, NASA scientists produced a map of the early universe which suggested that Guth was on the right track, but Kovak's evidence seemingly solidifies the theory:
Kovak's team found the smoking gun for inflation: evidence of gravitational radiation, or more specifically, swirling patterns in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. In the viewfinder of their telescope on the South Pole was light formed just 380,000 years after our universe banged onto the scene. And in that ancient light they detected gravitational radiation that is far older, having been emitted during the universe’s first fraction of a second of existence.
Guth's theory and Kovak's supporting observations strengthen the overall theory of the Big Bang and provide a clearer understanding of the birth of the universe. The full article can be read on The Boston Globe.
On a side note, the inflation theory is not Alan Guth's only achievement; he also won an award for the messiest office in Boston.
