Are you interested in how history, Hollywood, politics, the law, and religion interact with scientific discovery? Students in this course will use critical reading and writing, case studies, class discussion, film analysis, and role-playing to examine the important function science plays in everyone’s life, not just scientists. During part of the course, students will be assigned roles in “Reacting to the Past” games, which will explore important scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Galileo’s assertion of a heliocentric universe, by recreating the turbulent historical contexts that shaped them. This course aims to demonstrate how, as part of a liberal education, science is an important way of knowing about the world.