Online Course
PredictionX: Lost Without Longitude
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256
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Overview
Humans have been navigating for ages. As we developed the tools and techniques for determining location and planning a route, navigation grew into a practice, an art, and a science. Navigational skill has long been tied to commercial, economic, and military success. However, the ability to predict when and where one will reach a distant destination is more than just a key to empire-building — it’s often a matter of life and death.
Using video, text, infographics, and Worldwide Telescope tours, we will explore the tools and techniques that navigators have used, with a particular focus on the importance (and difficulty) of measuring longitude. Grounded in the principles of position, direction, speed, and time, we will learn the challenges of navigating without a GPS signal. We’ll learn how the Age of Exploration and the economic forces of worldwide trade encouraged scientific progress in navigation; and how Jupiter’s moons, lunar eclipses, and clockmakers all played a part in orienting history’s navigators.
Centuries of progress in navigation have helped put humans on the moon and spacecraft on a comet. This course will explain how we got there, and how that progress enables you to get where you’re going today.
Taught by
Alyssa Goodman
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Reviews
5.0 rating, based on 1 reviews
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Muhammad Shahid Kalim is taking this course right now, spending 7 hours a week on it and found the course difficulty to be easy.
Interesting to take courses even in this age. Very nice to get such education after a while. I will never give up even new and innovative courses in side and out side as well. I would like to welcome new fresh chaps in university environment. Thanks and lot of love from me.