Cosmic visions: bridging science and art

Since the dawn of recorded history, stargazing has shaped—and been shaped by—our understanding of the universe and the place of humans within it. Though we tend to conceptualize art and science as separate spheres, the observation of the heavens has always been interwoven with culture, and artists and astronomers continue to draw inspiration from one another even today. The authors of this paper, over the past few years, have developed and team-taught an interdisciplinary course titled Cosmic Visions: The Science of Astronomy and the Arts. Our course traces the shared, often symbiotic, history of these two ways of knowing, combining scientific instruction with examination of art in a range of genres and traditions, including visual art, music, and theater. Each week students engage in discussions, listen to lectures, and consider readings related to both the science of astronomy and the role of celestial objects in literature and the arts. A midterm and a final exam test students’ mastery of the science, while short essays on works of art and literature challenge them to think about how our changing understanding of heavenly bodies intersects with changing beliefs about humanity. The course culminates in an art project in which students express their own vision of the cosmos and our place within it. What happens when students employ humanistic modes of analysis in company with scientific ones? How does artistic expression change students’ apprehension of scientific concepts? This short essay offers preliminary answers to these deep pedagogical questions.Published versio

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 10, Issue 2, Summer 2021

Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice, and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at Boston University College of General Studies. Impact accepts submissions throughout the year and publishes issues in February and July. Please submit your essays for consideration at https:// citl.submittable.com/submit. Impact provides free and open access to all of its research publications. There is no charge to authors for publication, and the journal abides by a CC-BY license. Authors published in Impact retain copyright on their articles, except for any third-party images and other materials added by Impact, which are subject to copyright of their respective owners. Authors are therefore free to disseminate and re-publish their articles, subject to any requirements of third-party copyright owners and subject to the original publication being fully cited. Visitors may download and forward articles subject to the citation requirements; all copyright notices must be displayed. If readers want to search by journal subject they might use these words: education, graduate, undergraduate, interdisciplinary, disciplines, curriculum, higher education.The theme of this issue is interdisciplinary approaches to, or including, the sciences. STEM disciplines like chemistry, biology, physics, computer science, and math are often taught as separate and distinct from the humanities. The concept of STEAM (STEM + Arts) has attempted to make STEM subjects more interdisciplinary, allowing students to interact with the material from different perspectives. The essays in this issue explore unique ways to design and implement interdisciplinary curricula that combine sciences and humanities/arts

Synchrotron and FEL Studies of Matter at High Pressures

Samples compressed to very high pressures are typically very small or exist for only a very short period of time. Researchers seeking to make x-ray studies of matter under such conditions have therefore always sought access to the brightest possible x-ray sources – synchrotrons – and, more recently, x-ray FELs. In this chapter, after a brief introduction and a short history of high-pressure science, I describe the techniques used to compress matter to pressures well above 1 million atmospheres (1 megabar or 100 GPa) both statically and dynamically and then review how experiments are conducted on such samples at both synchrotrons and XFELs. I conclude with a discussion about the opportunities afforded by the start-up of diffraction-limited synchrotrons and the new European XFEL