*Plug*… *Bzzzt*… I can do Astrophysics!

Okay, maybe saying I can do Astrophysics is a bit presumptuous. But I can do the kind of basic, back-of-an-envelope calculations that grounds a passing familiarity with the major concepts of the field, and I'm more or less up to date with some of the principal areas of active astronomical research in 2014.

Or at least, that's what the Australian National University thinks, since they'll sign a certificate to that effect once ASTRO1x − The Greatest Unsolved Mysteries of the Universe is closed. For… drum roll…

I have now progressed beyond a passing grade in ASTRO1x !

That's my 10th edX certificate secured, 12th overall.

Yeah, yeah, I know a couple of days ago I wrote I was “struggling” with this course, and now I post an almost-perfect progress report. Thing is, I was lagging somewhat and I was more than a bit miffed that I failed to answer an easy question about redshift − that's the dip you see in the Homework 5 assignment (that was a 2-point question and the homework assignments are very short in this course). To my defense, I also did write that I was “well on my way to get my 10th edX certificate with this course”, so there.

Anyway. I don't have much merit though, the course being very easy − in reality, it's not the grading and the passing that's important here, it's the communicating about the science. In other words, I doubt Paul Francis and Brian Schmidt care one bit about assessing students' capabilities; what they do care about is to get the ideas across to as many people as possible.

If you ask me, that's great. From where I'm sitting, it's hard to get excited about quasars and/or particle physics. When the LHC team at CERN said last year that they'd conclusively proved the existence of the Higgs boson, I was among those who went, “huh, okay, but what's the point?” Doing this MOOC won't change much my understanding of relativity, quantum mechanics, bosons, baryons and tachyons − that wasn't really the point; the point is that I know have a feel for how dynamic “hard physics” as a field is, how, contrary to the common idea, some of the big questions left unanswered are in fact fairly simple (the answers may be horrendously complicated, though). How short we are of having really figured out this universe we live in.

And that's bloody exciting.

Stuff to be done:

• watch the two remaining lectures
• do the two remaining homework
• sit the final
• wait for ASTRO2x - Exoplanets to begin!