Gravity, Space & Black Holes

Service Description

This dynamic 8-week summer course takes students on a journey through one of nature's most fundamental forces — from Galileo rolling balls down inclined planes and Cavendish weighing the Earth in his backyard, to Einstein's mind-bending vision of curved spacetime, and finally to the exotic frontiers of black holes and gravitational waves. Beginning with Newtonian gravity and building toward General Relativity, students will explore how our understanding of gravity has evolved over four centuries through hands-on experiments, thought experiments, and real scientific data — including signals from colliding black holes detected by LIGO. No advanced mathematics required: just curiosity, a willingness to question what you think you know, and a readiness to have your sense of space and time turned completely upside down.