The course provides students with elementary logic skills and an understanding of scientific arguments. Ours is an increasingly scientific and technical society. In both our personal life decisions and in our work we are daily confronted by scientific results which influence what we do and how we do it. Basic skills in analyzing the structure of arguments in terms of truth and evidence are required to make this type of information accessible and useful. We hear, for example, that drinking alcoholic beverages reduces the chances of heart disease. We might well ask what sorts of tests were done to reach this conclusion and do the tests really justify the claim? We read that certain geographical configurations in South America "prove" that this planet was visited by aliens from outer space. Does this argument differ from other, accepted scientific arguments? This course is designed to aid the student in making sense of a variety of elementary logic skills in conjunction with the application of those skills to actual cases.

Causation is one of the most indispensable concepts we use to navigate the world. Knowing how things are causally related is of crucial importance in both ordinary and scientific inquiry. Despite this, there is no general consensus on what causation is, or how it relates to the picture of the world given to us by the sciences. In this course, we explore the history of this concept to the present day, where a new set of tools have been developed to help scientists extract causal connections from statistical data.

Modern physics rests on three pillars: quantum mechanics, relativity, and statistical mechanics. Despite the enormous successes of each of these theories, it remains unclear what they tell us about what the world is like and our place in it. There exist many outstanding questions about how to best formulate and interpret these theories. All proposals to understand them require us to accept some deeply counterintuitive ideas about reality.

In this course, we consider the metaphysical, epistemological, and conceptual questions that arise from quantum mechanics, relativity, and statistical mechanics. These include questions about the nature of space and time, the relation between matter and spacetime, the quantum measurement problem, “interpretations” of quantum mechanics, quantum non-locality, the nature of probability, and the relationship between physical theories.