Review: Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

Redefining Reality is a great courses audio/video course about the various paradigm shifts in science that have affected our view of the universe. It's a good refresher course if you somehow skipped all your science courses in school, but it won't offer you very much new stuff otherwise.

There are a few interesting points that I picked out. For instance, there's a philosophical reductionist argument that everything in the world reduces to physics, and that if you understood physics at a fundamental level, chemistry is just physics, and biology is just chemistry, and so on and so-forth. But the opposite school views many important properties in the sciences as emergent behavior, which is to say that you can understand physics all you like, but that doesn't make weather prediction easy or possible using purely physical principles.

There's a grand survey of everything from physics, chemistry, cosmology, biology, and the social sciences as well (including economics, sociology, psychology, etc), but if you're a well read scientist or technical person in this century, you probably already know everything in this course.

Not recommended.