Professor: Barbara Mossberg
4 credits
“Dear Dr. B:
Thank you for writing about your class for the Clark Honors College. I know e=mc2 is a poem. I myself “thought like the sun” journeying on a sunbeam. Indeed, this concept led to my theories of relativity, what you call “equation elation.” I am honored to join your Thought Group, and your remarkable students. Yours ever, Albert E.”
“Dear Professor Mossberg,
Having done seven missions to space as an astronaut transformed by my journey into a Poet, I am delighted to join your seekers of the Sun. Story Musgrave.”
“Dear Fellow Mortal,
As Rabbi Burns called me. I wonder how you think a muskrat knows the sun? Or field mouse like me thinks like the sun—as long as you are stirring things up?” Yours sincerely, F.M.
What does it mean to think like the sun--an ultimate Other? Welcome to my world of questions that take us down the Rabbit Hole. I am excited and honored for this opportunity for extra-boundary learning in the Clark Honors College dimension. This is a problem-based course, designed to promote practical thinking and imagination for creative solutions to large-scale and minutely-felt complex challenges.
Wondering what existence is like from other points of view, we are expressing our human capacity to relate to Others with knowledge and imagination. We enlist Others such as Einstein and Story Musgrave as we research, write to, interview, and act out a host of Others, animate and inanimate, imagined and historical, from rocks to our own community members, and even ourselves, as our Lights in “thinking like the sun.”
Our colloquium is essentially a spacetime workshop for understanding relationships and belonging that govern learning in our world. Learning from everything turns the world into teachers and mentors. The ideas of connectivity and inclusion at the heart of natural laws are explored across disciplines and species, whether expressed as metaphors in the humanities, equations in mathematics, taxonomy in biophysics, or deep structure in geology or linguistics. With diverse perspectives, we can look at ourselves and our problems, big or little, our galactic world as we know it, with more empathy: forgiveness, love, and appreciation, and most of all, greater understanding of the reality of our common need for one another in an interdependent world. “That’s what I said, only I said it shorter.” A. Einstein