First day of classes, etc

Tuesday October 7th

So my first day of lectures and classes has arrived. First one, the 10:00 John Worrall lecture on History of Science, more particularly, on Scientific Revolutions, and even more particularly, mainly on Copernicus to Newton (though there is also a section on Darwin next term). Everything is very high-tec and not just because this is being held in the imaginatively named "New Academic Building". Each room has PCs and projector systems and the teacher simply logs on to the LSE system and finds their lectures on their own folders. I'm sure this has become standard everywhere by now, but it was the first time I've seen it in operation and I was quite impressed.

The lecture itself was ok - but this is a subject i already know alot about and I don't expect to be surprised by it too much.

Immediately afterwards is the associated graduate seminar in one of the rooms upstairs. Our tutor (who I think is called George) set about allocating some seminar topics and I have volunteered to speak in two weeks time about the motion of the stars, sun and moon as observed from earth. I also made a number of points during the discussion itself as we talked about Karl Popper. Next week's talk is on Lakatos and his MSRP - ages since I read that!

Then a long gap for the afternoon - 6 hours to fill before the Philosophy of Science module kicks off at 6:00pm. Lunch in what used to be the "Brunch Bowl" but now seems to have been recently rebranded, then off to the library for a few hours. I really need somewhere to doze and am wondering if the departmental post grad common room would be the best plan - not sure where that is though! I settled in near the Lakatos Collection on the third floor of the library and did spend an hour or so looking through these shelves - there could be lots of good stuff here which would be best found by looking shelf by shelf.

And finally it is 6:00pm and time for the Philosophy of Science lecture and seminar with my tutor Miklos Redei. Things start off poorly and don't really improve. The immediate problem is that a huge number of poeple have turned up - far too many for the lecture theatre that had been booked. Many seem to be inter-collegiate students from King's. Miklos is clearly somewhat surprised by this. The lecture is ok (a brief intro into some historical examples of philosophy of science from the history of philosophy) but then the same problem arises with the seminar where over 30 people turn up. This is next to useless for a seminar discussion - indeed LSE has a rule that the maximum number for a seminar can be 19. Above that and a second seminar has to be arranged. So the seminar is pretty unfocused - a random discussion of some of the issues raised in the lecture. No one had done the pre-seminar reading (I don't have the material for this either). So not a good start to this one.

So I left home at 6:30 this morning and arrived home at about 11:00. That is definitely a very long day!