Science & Mathematics

Get a new perspective on two of the greatest achievements of human culture in the 12 dazzling lectures of How Music and Mathematics Relate, taught by award-winning mathematician and musician David Kung of St. Mary's College of Maryland. Understanding the connections between music and mathematics helps you appreciate both, even if you have no special ability in either field. By exploring the mathematics of music, you learn why non-Western music sounds so different, gain insight into the technology of modern sound reproduction, and start to hear the world around you in exciting new ways. No expertise in either music or higher-level mathematics is required to appreciate this astonishing alliance between art and science.

• Save Up To $185

Examine groundbreaking research on the enigmatic phenomenon of sleep, straight from a scientist at the forefront of the field. In these 24 engrossing lectures, award-winning Stanford University professor H. Craig Heller reveals what happens in the sleeping brain all the way down to the cellular and molecular level as you investigate coping mechanisms for jet lag, shift work, and insomnia; parasomnias such as sleepwalking and night terrors; and much more.

• Save Up To $475

Discover the beauty and simplicity of science's most fundamental branch with Physics and Our Universe: How It All Works. Intensively illustrated with diagrams, experiments, animations, graphs, and other visual aids, these 60 lectures by engaging and award-winning Professor Richard Wolfson introduce you to scores of fundamental ideas such as Newtonian mechanics, waves and fluids, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, optics, and relativity and quantum theory.

Humans have been having fun and games with mathematics for thousands of years. Along the way, they've discovered the amazing utility of this field—in science, engineering, finance, games of chance, and many other aspects of life. This course of 24 half-hour lectures celebrates the sheer joy of math, taught by a mathematician who is literally a magician with numbers. Professor Arthur T. Benjamin shows how everything in mathematics is connected—how the beautiful and often imposing edifice that has given us algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, probability, and so much else is based on nothing more than fooling around with numbers.

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The desire to identify lawbreakers and bring them to justice is so great that it has inspired countless stories, novels, plays, movies, and television series. But how accurate are the fictional portrayals of crime investigations? What happens behind the scenes when forensic scientists crack a case? Trails of Evidence: How Forensic Science Works takes you from the crime scene to the lab to the courtroom in 36 riveting half-hour lectures by forensic anthropologist and Professor Elizabeth A. Murray that reveal how forensic science really works.

The religious impulse is so powerfully pervasive that neuroscience has posed a provocative question: Are our brains wired to worship? In The Spiritual Brain: Science and Religious Experience, award-winning scholar and practicing neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Newberg, Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, offers you 24 riveting lectures that explore the new and exciting field of neurotheology, a discipline aimed at understanding the connections between our brains and different kinds of religious phenomena. Using an academic, experimental approach into what he calls “objective measures of spirituality,” Dr. Newberg attempts to explain what others have previously only guessed at: the neuroscientific basis for why religion and spirituality have played such a prominent role in human life.

Time rules our lives. From the rising and setting of the sun to the cycles of nature, the thought processes in our brains, and the biorhythms in our day, nothing so pervades our existence and yet is so difficult to explain. Time seems to be woven into the very fabric of the universe. But why? In 24 riveting half-hour lectures, Mysteries of Modern Physics: Time shows how a feature of the world that we all experience connects us to the instant of the formation of the universe—and possibly to a multiverse that is unimaginably larger and more varied than the known cosmos.

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Nanotechnology is today’s most powerful engine of innovation, turning cutting-edge research into applications at an astonishing rate. Now, in the 24 accessible and visually rich half-hour lectures of Introduction to Nanotechnology: The New Science of Small, get an in-depth explanation of this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary science that operates at the level of atoms and molecules. You’ll learn about once-fantastical applications that are transforming tools, products, and services in the communications, technology, medical, energy, and engineering worlds, and that hold great promise for meeting some of society’s greatest challenges.