Curricular programs
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In response to increasing student interest in science’s latest answers to the Big Questions, and the growing importance of science in today’s knowledge economy, Sacramento State will join the ranks of top-tier universities offering History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) programs, launching its own HPS Program in fall 2014. Sacramento State's HPS Program includes new course offerings in the Department of History, a Student Research Initiative, visiting scholars, the Ultimate Questions Student Discussion Group, and more.
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Graduate Courses at U.C. Berkeley - Graduate Theological Union: Starting spring 2015, the CPNS Program for Science and Human Values, in collaboration with U.C. Berkeley-GTU, will be offering graduate courses that explore the history and philosophy of religion and modern science. The first of these courses was "Orthodox Christianity and Modern Science: A Dialogue with the Western Scholastic Tradition, taught by Michael Epperson (ST 4320, Tuesdays 11:10 - 2:00 PM, MUDD 205)
History Department Curriculum Design Grant awarded to design CSUS’s first history of science and religion course. HIST 104B, "Reading the Heavens: The Coevolution of Christian and Scientific Understandings of the Universe in the West" examines the co-evolution of western science and Christian theology from the vantage point of intellectual history. Click here for the syllabus.
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Foundations of Relational Realism (Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield, 2013) represents the capstone of our 2010-2013 project, along with a number of published papers and conference presentations. With this foundational work in place, our next step is to demonstrate the experimental applicability of this sheaf theoretic quantum formalism and its philosophical conceptual framework—viz. its advantages both in terms of prediction and interpretation of data. To that end, we propose to apply the relational realist framework to the task of explicating the well-known but poorly understood problem of quantum geometric (topological) phases. We are doing so via an analysis of experimental data on the Aharonov-Bohm Effect, the Pancharatnam Phase, and the Quantum Hall Effect, toward a unified interpretation of all three.
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Sha Xin Wei (ASU), Stuart Kauffman (Santa Fe), Giuseppe Longo (École Normale Supérieure), Michael Epperson (CPNS - CSUS), Adam Nocek (ASU), Cary Wolfe (Rice), Phillip Thurtle (Univ. of Washington), Gaymon Bennett (ASU), Erin Espelie (University of Colorado). OPG is a research stream animated by the thesis that the living world in all its modes—biological, semiotic, economic, affective, social, etc.—escapes finite schema of description. Our work is based on a deep and sustained engagement with biological, physical, and computational sciences, operating in conjunction with anthropological, philosophical, and artistic modes of inquiry. Recent publication: Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 25.3, Special Issue, "Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity," June 2020.
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As part of Sacramento State's History and Philosophy of Science Initiative, CPNS Undergraduate Student Research Fellows develop and implement interdisciplinary research projects bridging empirical inquiry within the fields of the natural sciences and mathematics (NSM) into cross-connection with the field of history and philosophy of science (HPS). These faculty supervised student research projects give undergraduates crucial experience in the synthesis of new ideas and their proper investigation via both empirical study and analysis of scholarly literature in the natural sciences, philosophy of science, and history of science. Beyond these goals, the CPNS Student Research Initiative provides students with the unique opportunity to network and collaborate with both CPNS Graduate Research Fellows and CPNS Faculty Research Fellows across multiple institutions, both nationally and internationally. Click here for our 2014-2015 Project: "Tesla's Oscillator."
