AST 100: Our Cosmic History

1. Content

The course content is written as fictional dialogues between Socrates and his seven students who live in a fictional Barzakh.

Chapter	Name	Week	Main character	River
0	Seven Ages of the Universe	1, 2	Socrates
1	Particle Age	3, 4	Rabi	Angsi
2	Galactic Age	5, 6	Shashi	Tsangpo
3	Stellar Age	8	Mars	Siang
4	Planetary Age	9	Hermes	Brahmaputra
5	Chemical Age	10	Juno	Jamuna
6	Biological Age	11	Ishtar	Padma
7	Cultural Age	12, 13	Rhea	Meghna

Type	Assessment	Marks	Total
Continuous	Attendance¹⁾	10	60
	Punctuality²⁾	10
	Group work	25
	MCQ Quizzes	15
Summative	Midterm presentation	20	40
Summative	Final presentation	20	40

Eric Chaisson, Epic of Evolution, Columbia University Press.
Thomas Arny and Stephen Schneider, Explorations: Introduction to Astronomy, McGraw Hill.
Fred Spier, Big History and the Future of Humanity, Wiley.
Jay M. Pasachoff and Alex Filippenko, The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, Cambridge University Press.
David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, University of California Press.

¹⁾

Measured by the percentage of classes the student attended.

²⁾

Measured by the average number of minutes students arrive late to class.