Developing Critical Thinking Skills

One goal of this course is to have you develop the skill of taking knowledge you are familiar with, and applying it to unfamiliar situations.

Take for example, a metal rod that inserted into a campfire:

Now consider the nighttime sky:

If you look closely at the stars, you should notice that they have different colors. 

If you used your knowledge of how color and temperature relate for hot objects, you could correctly infer that "cool" stars are red, and "hot" stars are blue/white.  This is called Wien's Law, and we will talk more about it later in the semester.