Our Cosmic History
Fourteen billion years. One continuous story — and you are its newest chapter.
It is all one story.
For most of history we kept the Universe in separate drawers: physics in one, chemistry in another, biology and human history in others still. The idea at the heart of this course is that there are no drawers. Stars, planets, living cells, thinking minds, and whole civilizations are not separate subjects — they are chapters of a single fourteen-billion-year story, each one built from the matter and the lessons of the chapter before.
Two thinkers drew that line most clearly, and this course follows where they pointed.
He gave complexity a single number — the energy that flows through every gram of a thing each second — and watched it climb, age after age, from galaxies to plants to brains to the modern world.
He told the whole past as one continuous account — refusing the old wall between natural science and human history — as the Universe crosses threshold after threshold into ever-greater complexity.
Science for citizens of the Universe.
You do not need calculus to belong to the cosmos — you need the story. AST 100 is built for students of business, the humanities, and the social sciences: people who will lead, write, vote, and create, and who deserve to do it as citizens of the Universe rather than tourists passing through it.
So we trade equations for perspective. Where a number truly matters we say it in plain words and real units; everywhere else we lean on sight, scale, and story to show you where — and when — you stand in fourteen billion years.
An impossible course, made possible.
This course could not have been built a year ago. Beginning in the spring of 2026, Claude — Anthropic's AI, at claude.ai — laid down the skeleton of this website. Then Claude Code, running the Opus model, went through it lesson by lesson: rewriting every page in plain language and rebuilding the flat diagrams of a textbook as living, interactive figures you can take hold of yourself.
The result is something new — a textbook that moves, assembled at a speed and a depth that simply were not possible before.
Harnessed by a human expert.
None of this ran on autopilot. Every lesson and every figure was guided by an expert astrophysicist — years of research and university teaching beyond the PhD — who checked the facts and, just as carefully, checked that each interactive figure faithfully reflects the real science it depicts.
The AI did the building. A human expert decided what was true — and what was worth showing.
Every figure is alive.
“Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.” — Socrates, in Plato's Phaedrus 275d · trans. H. N. Fowler
Twenty-four centuries ago, that was Socrates' reason for never writing his philosophy down: a book cannot answer you. Put a question to it and it only repeats itself — the same words, forever. The flat diagrams in an ordinary textbook are precisely the silent paintings he describes.
So we set out to build figures Socrates could not dismiss — figures you can question. Here is one, live on this page, not a screenshot. It shows Eric Chaisson's measure of complexity: the energy that flows through every kilogram of a thing each second (measured in watts per kilogram, W/kg — a watt is simply a unit of power, like the rating printed on a lightbulb). Time runs straight across the fourteen billion years since the Big Bang, while the height climbs by powers of ten. Step through the ages and watch the number stay flat for billions of years — through the first galaxies and stars — then rocket upward more than a millionfold to a modern society.
Drag the slider, hover the points, or open it fullscreen and use your arrow keys.
Every figure works two ways. In the lecture hall, the professor drives it on the big screen, narrating each step. At home, you take the controls yourself — replaying, pausing, and poking at it until it clicks. Ask it a question, and unlike the painted figures of the Phaedrus, it answers.
Proven with 200 students.
In the summer of 2026 the course runs at IUB across five sections of forty — two hundred students learning the cosmos the same immersive way: surrounded by living figures in the lecture hall, and exploring them again on their own screens at home.
Start anywhere. The story holds.
Three doors into fourteen billion years — each one opens on the whole.
Learn here. Assessed on Kriterion.
This site is where you learn the cosmos. Where your work is measured is Kriterion — CASSA's in-house learning-management system (LMS) and assessment platform, built for Independent University, Bangladesh, and shared by every CASSA course, AST 100 among them.
Each semester a course opens on Kriterion with its own roster, quizzes, reports, and grade book, across three roles — admin, faculty, and student. You sign in with your @iub.edu.bd Google account, and the quizzes and progress reports you see in the course outline all run there.