BIG HISTORY FRAMEWORK: David Baker - Big History, Critical Thinking, & Transdisciplinarity

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Big History: Connecting Knowledge

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Macquarie University

Big History: Connecting Knowledge

852 classificações

We currently face unprecedented challenges on a global scale. These problems do not neatly fall into disciplines. They are complicated, complex, and connected. Join us on this epic journey of 13.8 billion years starting at the Big Bang and travelling through time all the way to the future. Discover the connections in our world, the power of collective learning, how our universe and our world has evolved from incredible simplicity to ever-increasing complexity. Experience our modern scientific origin story through Big History and discover the important links between past, current, and future events. You will find two different types of lectures. ‘Zooming In’ lectures from multiple specialists enable you to understand key concepts through the lens of different disciplines, whilst David Christian's ‘Big History Framework’ lectures provide the connective overview for a journey through eight thresholds of Big History.

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Big History, Critical Thinking, & Transdisciplinarity

Welcome to Big History! This is where we use the power of a transdisciplinary perspective to explore broad trends in the grand narrative of 13.8 billion years. In this module you'll learn how Big History works, explore critical-thinking, how we know what we know, and learn about the first "3 Thresholds of Increasing Complexity", milestones around which Big History is organized, starting at the beginning of the Universe, space, time, and everything in existence.

BIG HISTORY FRAMEWORK: David Baker - Big History, Critical Thinking, & Transdisciplinarity6:20

Conheça os instrutores

David Christian
Professor
Big History Institute
David Baker
Associate Lecturer
Big History Institute

Every now and then,

it's helpful to reflect on why the questions raised in this course matter.

Why should we study the history of 13.8 billion years.

[MUSIC]

Firstly, it provides a framework for

knowledge that we can then flush out with our studies into specialized subjects.

And also the knowledge we gain from our personal experiences.

We can see the connections between everything we learn and

know where it fits into the cosmic tale.

Big history encompasses the totality of all human knowledge about our origins

that we have discovered thus far.

And accordingly it forms a place to embed everything we learn in our lives.

It starts from the very beginning of space and

time and describes how complexity has increased since then.

And it forms a story that can embrace the knowledge from any discipline,

any time period and any subject.

If all human knowledge were some vast mountainous terrain then big history

allows you to locate yourself on the map of that terrain at any given time.

Secondly, learning the history of the universe and

the part we play in it can be a transformative experience.

We learn that every individual human is made of matter and energy that has been

around since the very beginning of the universe, 13.8 billion years ago.

And has merely changed form.

We learned that all life on earth descends from a universal common ancestor.

We learned how relatively recently our own species arrived on the scene and

how closely connected people of all nations, creeds, and

classes are in our common story.

As the world grows more tightly knit into one global system in the 21st century,

a common history that unites us all.

And also allows us to turn our gaze toward the rest of the universe is something that

is direly needed.

Thirdly, big history encourages transdisciplinarity on

an unprecedented scale.

If you study the connections between science and the humanities, you unify,

in your own mind, what C.P. Snow referred to as the 'two cultures'.

Those modes of thought that investigate natural phenomena and

those that investigate the societal and individual aspects of humanity.

Often, these two cultures are on the opposite sides of campus or

in different books on the other side of the library.

For generations now more and

more disciplinary boundaries have been drawn between different subjects and

specializations making it more and more of a daunting task

to weave them into one big picture in a unified way of viewing the world.

Both science and the humanities have something in common.

Science is in many ways historical.

Every time you look into the night sky, you are essentially looking into the past,

viewing the light of stars that shone thousands and

sometimes millions of years ago.

Scientists, of many backgrounds, search the heavens for

evidence to weave together a narrative of the expanding cosmos.

Every time you dig up a fossil, or

date the age of a rock on Earth, you are using evidence

to flesh out another part of the timeline of the Earth's geological history.

Or the fascinating march of the revolutionary epic.

Similarly, by looking at the documents from the middle ages or

digging up human artifacts from ancient times,

you were finding evidence that flushes out the narrative of our human past.

When we investigate politics or media, we are looking for

evidence to flush out the narrative of our own times.

In both the case of science and

the humanities, we have theorists who try to interpret that events.

Often interpretations differ, but theorists still endeavor to arrive at

the clearest picture of how phenomena in nature and human society came to be.

To enhance our understanding of how things work, enabling us to innovate To

make each others lives better, and to tackle the problems of the future.

Fourthly, transforming the story of 13.8 billion years into a framework for

knowledge gives us a great deal of practice in thinking critically,

in order to arrive at a clear picture of what Douglas Adams called life,

the universe and everything.

We have to take a hard look at claims of knowledge that are put to us

every single day on every single subject.

We have to be careful about what claims we accept, and what claims we reject.

In order to do that,

we have to reflect on the process by which we make those crucial judgments.

Sometimes, we have access to hard evidence.

Sometimes we must rely on our own keen sense of logic.

Sometimes we do not have access to evidence or

even a deep understanding of the subject.

So we must place our trust in the authority of experts.

And sometimes, more often than you think, we go with out gut.

All of those approaches are useful in their way.

And must work in concert, striking an intricate balance.

And most importantly, we must constantly update our framework for

knowledge as new arguments, new evidence, and new interpretations come to light.

Finally, why learn the history of the universe?

It's related to the age old question

of why we should bother to learn history in general.

As Cicero said in the days of ancient Rome,

to not know what happened before you were born is to forever remain a child.

History enriches our perspectives and

allows us to live a thousand lives instead of only one.

However, Cicero was talking about the histories of a few centuries.

The intrigues and battles of several generations of ancestors.

The same principle applies,

many times over, to learning the biggest of all stories.

The longest stretch of time.

With a start date, that commences 13.8 billion years ago,

with the origin of time itself.

We get to experience the wondrous transformations

of billions of years instead of a single lifetime.

And since, human consciousness arouse from the matter and

energy of this universe, every time we investigate big history,

we are in many ways the universe looking back on itself.

As if, contemplating itself in a mirror.

We grow wiser the more we look.

[MUSIC]

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