The title pretty much says it all. If I sat down and read Cosmos, and then spoke about it at the next cocktail party* to show how smart I am, would the astrophysicists there** laugh me out of the room?
*No, I don’t really go to cocktail parties.
**If I did go, I don’t think astrophysicists would be there. It would be more like a party where we would discuss whatever happened to Michael Dudikoff.
Only if they were that Tough Gang of Astrophysicists that Dominated the Telescope in that Gary Larson cartoon.
I think that you’ll be O.K. as long as you make it clear that you’re not completely up to date and not really an expert on these things. My limited experience with astrophysicists is that they don’t laugh at people whose knowledge of their field is limited. You’re not, for instance, going to learn from Cosmos that the current estimate of the age of the universe is 13.7 million years. Experts who look down at non-experts for failing to keep up with the current state of the field’s knowledge are jerks in any case.
I think that 13.7 million years figure is waaaaaaaay off… did you mean to say “billions”?
Yes, but Sagan said “billions” so many times that I figured that I had to make up for it by saying it less often.
Just some musings about “Cosmos,” which I saw recently:
I had never picked up on the way Sagan enunciated some of his words. There’s the way he said “billions,” of course, but he did that with other words, too. In one where he is talking about the Rosetta Stone, he pronounces “inscribed” as “inscribe duh.” In episode “The Persistence of Memory,” I think, he does say the word “billions” quite a few times.
I don’t know what the contemporary thinking about Moon formation theory was when this series was written, but in one he mentions a time in the Earth’s past when “the Moon was still accreting,” without mentioning how it had started–although, admittedly, that was not germane to his point.
He mentions monks having possibly witnessed an asteroid impact on the moon, and I think the current thinking is that that probably didn’t happen.
He also mentions that if a comet hit a planet like Jupiter, all it would do would poke holes in the atmosphere. I think his point there was that since Jupiter doesn’t have a solid surface, that there would be no impact crater. But we’ve witnessed a comet impacting Jupiter–and those were some pretty damn big holes.
He has one silly scene where he’s trying to imitate a whale song. Didn’t seem so silly when I first saw it in 1980, though.
OK, some petty, nitpicky things, but the series is still very enjoyable.
In the reissued series, they’ve apparently updated some of the photos .
In the USA, you can see the entire Cosmos documentary for free on Hulu:
The stuff regarding the latest information on planet Mars, I figure, would need an update.
Planetary science changes weekly so those parts of Cosmos are extremely out of date. On the other hand a lot of the broader concepts are still in place.
Yeah, it turns out no monks were ever actually on the moon.
IIRC, that was material from deeper cloud layers coming into view; it WAS holes, with stuff spewing out of them.
I have heard the Cosmos director and Sagan hated each other and the director purposely tried to make him look foolish. Such as Sagan’s spaced out looks aboard his “spaceship” as he looked at the viewscreen, “no Carl it’s not over the top you look great.” The Dragon’s of Eden pretty much discredited, Demon Haunted World more timely than ever, his best Shadow’s of Forgotten Ancesters, ahead of it’s time.
Carl Sagan’s spaced-out looks might be attributed to his smoking of marijuana:
In the Cosmos series, he talked about the curved space dealie, where there’s a 4th physical dimension and that if you had a powerful enough telescope that could magically make light come instantaneously from its point of emanation, you could see the back of your own head.
I’m pretty sure that model of the universe has been dropped.
Bup, I don’t recall that on the Cosmos series. I have the entire collection on DVD. I do remember him explaining how a being could interpret that there were higher dimensions that if you walked around the earth, even though it looked flat, you’d wind up where you started and you could infer that the earth was curved into a 3rd dimension. Then he said that if you traveled far enough in space and wound up at the same place where you started, you could infer that space was curved into a higher dimension. I don’t know if he was saying that that was the actual way the universe was set up, but merely saying that you could make that inference if you did wind up back where you started.
I have the Collector’s Edition DVD set and after most episodes they show an addendum he recorded in the early 90s regarding the changes in science that have happened since the series originally aired. Unfortunately, I can’t remember anything off the top of my head that he said is no longer accepted theory.
I remember it, although thirty years ago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it were an ‘invented’ memory. I have a very specific memory of him emphasizing ‘4th physical dimension’ to make it clear he wasn’t talking about time, which used to be referred to as the 4th dimension. But you make it clear that curved space is mentioned in Cosmos, but not the telescope seeing the back of your own head, so ‘4th physical dimension’ doesn’t help my case much.
Maybe Cyberhwk’s explanation gets me out of trouble.
Last I heard (and I only follow cosmological physics casually through Scientific American), a three-dimensional model of the universe was gaining ground.
I’ll try to remember that at my next cocktail party with astrophysicists.
I grow weary of cracking them all up by saying “biiiillions and biiiiillions…” It’s someone else’s turn to do the Sagan and Feynman and Hawking impersonations (but I’ll miss the way those geeks from the Cosmology Colloquium spray milk out their noses).
But what do I do when the party bogs down, and I know I can save it with my vast storehouse of Fitzgerald Contraction jokes?
From what I remember hearing, the reason Sagan said “billions” so distinctively was that he felt that most people were not used to hearing it at the time as an amount. So, he wanted to make it clear that he was talking about “billions” of stars, galaxies, etc. as opposed to the more commonly used word “millions.” I can’t remember where I read/heard that, but if I find it I’ll let you know.
I just got my copy of Cosmos off the shelf (first paperback edition 1983 by the coverpage) and paged through it. Didn’t find too many things that would “get you laughed out of the room” at your next casual astrophysicist party. I looked to see how old he claimed the universe is: “10 to 20 billion years ago, something happened - the Big Bang”. Actually still not technically inaccurate, though we’ve narrowed down the error bars thanks to the Hubble. And another thing which popped out, he discusses that Earth will be pleasantly habitable for several billion more years. Nowadays most scientists figure that the Sun will make Earth uninhabitable in just 1 billion years, long before it goes into full red giant mode. The book was written after the Voyager 1 & 2 encounters with Jupiter but before Saturn. Europa and Io are mentioned as particularly remarkable moons, but there’s no discussion about a possible liquid ocean beneath the “billard ball smooth” ice on Europa.
Someone’s been on dangling modifier patrol methinks.