Back to school

Tomorrow morning, I'll return to school. It's not  your typical course so I won't be buying a new lunch box or pocket protector. Instead, I'll show up at 9:30 at the Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester and be prepared to look at and listen to birds.

The course is an offering from W.I.S.E. (Worcester Institute for Senior Education), an innovative program of non-credit educational offerings sponsored by Assumption College. (Here's the Fall 2008 catalog in PDF.) The semester is divided into two parts. In the second session, I'll take a course titled Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for Laypeople. I don't think that they'll let us near the Large Hadron Collider, but we might understand a bit better why the world didn't implode when they turned on the LHC.