Course Listings

2025 Spring > UGRD > HONORS > HONORS 295

Honors Topics in the Natural Science

Course #: HONORS 295

Description:
An Honors course in the Natural Science distribution explores -- from term to term in varied specific cases -- the basic assumption that physical and biological science are knowable in terms of causality. In each Honors NS course, we will begin by exploring fundamental questions about natural sciences and the basic assumptions of the field. This course will address the question ''What is Natural Science?'' by exploring topics including: the difference between life science and physical sciences, the difference between data and information, the emphasis on metrics of measurement, the ability to go beyond being descriptive and enter the domain of being predictive, and the capacity to use measurements and patterns to create models of natural phenomena. We will discuss the fundamental basic assumptions of natural science, including: the world is knowable, humans can perceive and understand the world through structured observation, the things that happen in the world around us have natural causes, experiments and observations can be used to learn about these natural causes, and the causes that operate in the natural world are consistent and therefore can be represented through models and other forms of mathematical or quantitative expression. An Honors College course in Natural Sciences shares the attributes of university-wide Natural Science courses in its emphasis on learning how laws of the physical world are derived and tested, and gaining an understanding of how scientific knowledge is correctable. Students acquire hands-on experiences with the methodologies of science by learning how to articulate hypotheses, making observations, designing experiments, analyzing date, drawing conclusions, and engaging in problem solving. Students are taught how to engage scientific texts and data/information from the physical and life sciences, while also being trained to situate these data and texts in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts. In this way, an Honors course i
Pre Requisites:
Pre-requisite = Honors College students only