Begin with a dark night sky and follow the questions it refuses to settle. This course traces one chain of explanation through cosmology, heat, entropy, life, stars, quantum mechanics and matter, ending where our best physical theories stop agreeing.
What you will do
Every week hands the next one a question it cannot yet answer. You follow that chain through the lectures, work through four sessions where you do the calculating yourself — plotting real CMB data, counting microstates by hand, redoing the Sun's lifetime estimate, testing what degeneracy pressure can hold up — and write three short assessments that trace an explanation out to where it stops working. What you leave with is your own account of that edge, not someone else's.
Who it is for
This is a first-year course. It assumes no physics background and no mathematics beyond what you already have — calculation only enters once a question genuinely demands it, from Week 7 on. What it does assume is a willingness to take an ordinary observation seriously enough to ask why it's true.