Big Course: Year 1
Binge the recordings; see the world
Year 1 of our Big Course: an expedition through the world, full of jaw-dropping discoveries from the whole span of sciences.
Each lesson is a hard riddle. You’ll be peppered with stories, pictures, and experiments… until you make an insight that’ll change the way you see the world.
These are edited recordings of live lessons we gave in 2023–24. (We recommend you watch these before starting Year 2.)
“Two years later and my son still remembers stuff from your lessons.”
The six topics
Topic 1:
The Universe is Weird
In which we set the stage for the whole six years…
You’ll trace the steps of the people who figured out something important: the Universe ain’t what it looks like.
You’ll learn the stories of Newton, Hubble, and Fermi. You’ll see the roundness of the Earth with your own eyes, hear the discovery of the Big Bang, begin to see what makes science magic... and raise a big question: where do we fit into all of it?
-
How can you actually know something for sure?
Along the way you'll learn about the flat Earth, the Scientific Revolution, Thales, the so-called “Scientific Method”, and the secret sauce that powers science... and could change your life. (Spoilers: epistemology, the real scientific method, and Thales.)
-
What is the Solar System, really?
Along the way you'll learn how many planets there really are, the actual divide between the two kinds of balls, and why the Moon doesn't fall into the Earth. (Spoilers: gravity, astronomical bodies, and Newton.)
-
What do you really see at night?
Along the way you'll learn the true shape of constellations, the way in which you're still probably seeing the world as a flat-Earther, and what the galaxy really is. (Spoilers: constellations, astronomical distances, and the Milky Way.)
-
What can you see at night if you turn away from the Milky Way?
Along the way you'll learn what those pretty “nebula” photos on computer backgrounds really are, how long the Milky Way has to live, and whether or not the Universe has an edge. (Spoilers: Hubble, the cosmic microwave background, and the Big Bang.)
-
Where are all the aliens?
Along the way you'll learn what disturbed Enrico Fermi’s lunch, a geeky, mathy way to estimate the number of alien civilizations, and what is truly one of the biggest mysteries of all of science. (Spoilers: the Fermi Paradox, the Drake Equation, and astrobiology.)
Q: Do you teach the Earth is flat?
Have you heard the rumors, too?! Take a look at our full answer.
Topic 2:
Water is Weird
In which we start seeing the tiny things
You’ll understand the oddity of atoms — what they’re made of, and why they hook together to make molecules. You’ll hear the stories of Henry Cavendish and Niels Bohr. You’ll shrink down to see heat and motion, to glimpse the real shape of water, and to understand why that changes everything.
-
What is water made of?
We’ll go back in time to see where our ideas of “elements” and “atoms” come from... and the single, dangerous experiment that proved that they were way weirder than anyone had thought. (Spoilers: elements, atoms, molecules, Democritus, and Henry Cavendish.)
-
Why is water wet?
To understand that, we’ll push beyond the usual ball-and-stick model of molecules and understand water on the subatomic level! (Spoilers: the nucleus, electron orbits, electromagnetic charge, hydrogen bonds, Ant-Man, and Niels Bohr.)
-
Where do puddles go?
Sure, the answer seems obvious — they “evaporate”! But why do some things evaporate, but not others? You’ll hear the story of the huge scientific fight over what “heat” is, and shrink down to the nanoscale to understand what’s really going on in a puddle. (Spoilers: heat, phase changes, bond strength.)
-
Why do living things love water?
Water seems necessary for life — why? And why don’t oil and water mix? (Spoilers: solvents, unipolar vs. bipolar molecules.)
-
Why are snowflakes symmetrical?
Where does beauty and order come from? You’ll understand what snow is, see crystals growing up close, and understand something profound about the Universe. (Spoilers: crystallization, sublimation, deposition, entropy.)
Topic 3:
Lungs are Weird
In which we glimpse what a body really is
You’ll see how these molecules come together to make you. You’ll hear the stories of Galen, Andreas Vesalius, and William Harvey. You’ll learn why you have blood, why you breathe, what sort of animal you actually are... and the answer to the timeless riddle: when you lose weight, where does it go?
-
Where does “weight” go?
You eat about a pound of food a day, and you’re at least a few thousand days old. So why aren’t you the size of a hippo? Do you poop out the food... or something much stranger? What are you made of, anyway? What is going on in this world of ours?! (Spoilers: conservation of matter, the carbon cycle, and Antonie Lavoisier.)
-
Why’s there a dent in your lung?
How do your lungs actually work... and why do you have them in the first place? What does it mean to “breathe”, and why does every animal seem to do it? (Spoilers: your respiratory system, cellular respiration, cells, blood, and William Harvey.)
-
Why do we have lungs?
Bees don’t have lungs. Fish don’t, either. A while ago, you didn’t have lungs! How do they breathe — and what do all these methods have in common? (Spoilers: solubility, gills, diffusion, and our old friend entropy.)
-
What is a lung, really?
Body parts always come from somewhere! What was the first animal with lungs? What was a lung before it was a lung? This lesson, you’ll climb far up your family tree. (Spoilers: vertebrate evolution, exaptation, Charles Darwin and his frenemy St. George Jackson Mivart.)
-
How do you protect your gooey lungs?
“Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest, and opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”
–Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, volume 9(Spoilers: your cilia, your bones, and your whole danged immune system.)
Topic 4:
Clouds are Weird
In which we touch the sky
You’ll begin to wrestle with clouds as physical objects that somehow float above our heads... even as they obey the laws of science! You’ll hear the stories of Luke Howard and James Epsy. You’ll learn to weigh clouds, see the sky in 3D, understand what rain really is, and recognize what kinds of clouds can kill you.
-
Why do clouds float?
It’s anti-gravity, right? They’re filled with tiny anti-gravity boots? (Spoilers: density, air pressure, condensation, and a certain letter written by Evangelista Torricelli that changed the world.)
-
Where do clouds come from?
A cloud is less a thing than a process... one that happens too slowly for our squirrel brains to pay attention to. But once you see a cloud actually being born, you’ll never look at the sky the same way. (Spoilers: convection, rain shadows.)
-
How long would it take to walk up to a cloud?
Let’s get a sense of scale — how big are these things? How high up are they? What are we talking about when we talk about the “sky”? (Spoilers: types of clouds, troposphere, and Luke Howard.)
-
What makes it rain, hail, or snow?
Why are some clouds “rain clouds”, and others aren’t? Does it ever rain without a cloud? What’s up with hail? And why does hair spray always feel cold? (Spoilers: dew point, condensation nuclei, the conservation of energy, latent heat, precipitation.)
-
What makes lightning?
Remember, all these lessons are building on each other — and here we’re going to follow an implication of something we mentioned in “Water”... even if it kills us. (Spoilers: plasma, Thor Odinson, ions, electromagnetism, electron avalanches.)
Topic 5:
Bacteria are Weird
In which we meet the “wee beasties” that you’re touching RIGHT NOW
You’ll open your eyes to see Earth’s real rulers. You’ll hear the stories of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Louis Pasteur, and Lynn Margulis. You’ll learn how to stop them, how to help them, and what they were doing for the first three billion years of life. And most importantly, you’ll wrestle with one of philosophy’s most profound questions: what is it like to be a bacterium?
-
Why do we wash our hands?
Turns out the right answer isn’t always the most obvious one... or even the second most obvious one! (Spoilers: traditional medicine, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and Ignaz Semmelweis.)
-
How scared should we be of bacteriums?
Meet one of our oldest enemies... and how we stumbled into the middle of an ancient war, and chose a side. (Spoilers: antibiotics, antibiotic resistance, and Alexander Fleming.)
-
How could you stop food from rotting... if you were stuck back in time?
Turns out Stone-Age humans figured out something pretty darned clever about bacteriums... and it may have transformed society. (Spoilers: zymurgy, Lactobacillus.)
-
What’s it like to be a bacterium?
Sure, they’re “alive” — but if you were turned into a bacterium, would it be like being a rock? Are bacteriums conscious? What is “consciousness” anyway? (Spoilers: the “easy” problems of consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness.)
-
Why do people get cancer?
If you know anything about cancer, you might be surprised to see us ask this question in “Bacteria”. Don’t worry. We have something interesting up our sleeves. (Spoilers: the evolution of life, mitochondria, endosymbiosis, and Lynn Margulis.)
Topic 6:
Snails are Weird
In which we wave “hullo!” to honest-to-goodness real animals, and they wave back with their cute little stalk eyes
You’ll look deep into the eyes of a snail, and see yourself staring back. You’ll hear the stories of Aristotle and Carolus Linnaeus. You’ll learn about the perils of being alive, the strangeness of biological sex, the deep unity of animal life, and that one time that snails ruled the Earth.
-
What's the biggest snail? The fastest? The most dangerous?
Along the way to the answer, you'll learn about multiple kinds of horrible worms, an interesting predilection of the Roman Army, and a jet engine.
-
How does a snail smell, see, breathe, poop, and eat?
Along the way to the answer, you'll learn about... well, honestly, about those things. This is one of those lessons that doesn't so much uncover the deep weirdness of reality as go HOLY CRAP THESE THINGS ARE SO WEIRD, JUST LOOK AT THEM.
-
What was a snail to the namer of all life?
Along the way to the answer, you'll learn about the end of medieval Europe, binomial nomenclature, and how a weird sentence about a king's cough can make all of biology make more sense.
-
What's a "mollusk"?
Along the way to the answer, you'll learn what a slug is, what a clam is, and what an octopus is. You'll also learn what Linnaeus missed, and the REAL reason he missed it.
-
How's a sea slug so smart?
Along the way to the answer, you'll learn what a sea slug is, the story of the guy who figured out what THINKING is, and understand how LEARNING works through an insanely convoluted metaphor. You'll also learn, well, something really important about how to learn better — and (kind of) what you ARE.
Year 1 is only the beginning. Take a peek at Year 2…
What you’ll get with each topic
-
8+
hours of video
-
5
imaginative labs
-
5
book recommendations
-
5
spaced-repetition flashcard decks
-
16
pages of question-and-answer review
-
15
links to carefully-curated YouTube videos
Year 1 FAQ
-
We aim for 8–15, but we have students older and younger than that, too. (Sometimes adults sign up for themselves.)
-
About 90 minutes in total, broken up into 20–30 minute chunks.
-
For as long as your subscription lasts.
-
And how! The video lessons by themselves may be more than enough for younger kids; for older kids, you may want to add on the many activities in our Deep Dives.
-
We design each lesson (and its Deep Dive activities) to take a full week — but you can go at your own pace!
-
Just a notebook — we recommended a dotted one, like this or this
-
You betcha. Some of our families do just that, and enjoy the heck out of the experience (and the conversations they spark after).
-
Actually, these are the same thing as the live webinar — just lightly edited for your viewing pleasure.
-
Quite a few: see our Discounts page.
-
We can try! See our “help us become a vendor” page.
-
Loads of people! See “Why You Might Hate Us.” (But remember our Ridiculous Guarantee.)
-
We build these to go in order, so we recommend starting with “The Universe”. (That said, we won’t stop you if you want to start with another topic.)
-
Feel free to use it with everyone in your family! (You don’t need to purchase it multiple times.)
-
With the recordings, there's no need to sign up again — your membership will give you access to ALL our science lessons (or at least all the ones we've done so far).