Class Central is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Harvard University

PredictionX: Lost Without Longitude

Harvard University via edX

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

Reviews

5.0 rating, based on 1 Class Central review

4.5 rating at edX based on 16 ratings

Start your review of PredictionX: Lost Without Longitude

  • Muhammad Shahid Kalim
    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.

Never Stop Learning.

Get personalized course recommendations, track subjects and courses with reminders, and more.

Someone learning on their laptop while sitting on the floor.