Oh, well, that’s a perfectly reasonable reason to publicly set him on fire. :rolleyes:
I think its fair to say that if on the list of charges against him were the sciency things, that they in some part played a roll in his fate. Don’t you?
Did the inquisition keep track of specific sentences for each of the counts against him, or did they just aggregate them into one, “Burn, muthafucka, burn”?
Bricker never said it was, just that it wasn’t about his scientific teachings. And sadly, at that time, burning people at the stake for heresy (and other reasons) happened all over the place. I don’t think anyone’s condoning it, dude.
I think Bruno’s a horrible example anyway. As Tyson mentioned at the end, his ideas were explicitly non-sciencific. He happened to be (sort of) right, but he really had no evidence for his claims. He was essentially making a theological argument that turned out to have some astronomical truth in them.
Why not look at a real scientist who was persecuted for their evidence-based beliefs? I can point to thousands of people burned at the stake for holding the wrong religious beliefs.
Overall, I enjoyed the show, and I look forward to seeing the rest of the episodes.
Incidently, Tyson talked a little bit about why they’re putting it on FOX. I liked the quote (in response to FOX having a bit of an anti-science reputation):
“The only thing that they were concerned about was — Was anybody inhaling on the show? And whether or not there was any frontal nudity”
I took what he said as defending the church, since you know it didn’t burn him for his cosmological heresy, it burned him because he thought Jesus was magic.
Which sounded kinda funny, which is why I posted. To be clear, I’m sure Bricker isn’t a fan of burning heretics. Which may be the nicest thing I’ve ever said about him. 
Gotta agree about the commercials. They just destroyed ANY semblance of continuity! And get this, the last book I read had CHAPTERS! And the last album I listened to had SONGS! Talk about dumbing things down…
It sounds more like they burned him for not thinking Jesus was magic enough.
Maybe it’s just because I’m older than most of you guys, because I was well into my 20s when I watched the original Cosmos and… it was good, but not that good. Granted, I think Sagan is a different league as a host than Tyson, but I can remember cringing more than once watching the original when they oversimplified or didn’t get something quite right.
Well, while I didn’t care for the commercials this pilot was a heck of a lot better than the pilot of the original Cosmos, which had Sagan blabbing about the journey than actually showing anything for half the show.
This was very well done, and I think Tyson is perfect for the role. My opinion and I will not apologize for it.
I think the church was all, “Jesus is totally like Eru Ilúvatar” and Brouno was all, “No way, Jesus isa likea de Gandalf!”
I liked the show. I would have preferred less flying around in the standup spacecraft. The 365 day calendar analogy was interesting. Didn’t need Bruno’s cartoon. However… describing The Big Bang as an explosion? Eh, you know, as long as people are cool with the word Bang in it’s name, I won’t get too hung up on the explosion metaphor.
All in all, not bad, better than most crap on antenna tv on Sunday night.
Speak for yourself! When I hear fundamentalists talk crazy I get nostalgic for the good ol’ days when we could just kill them.
It was one of those teachable moments we’re told we should take advantage of.
I liked how Brannon Braga gave Tyson the helm on the Enterprise bridge.
Agreed. When I saw the original one, it seemed like Sagan would gape at not very good special effects for hours. If you’ve ever seen “Real Genius” the villain, their adviser, had a show called “Everything” and was modeled at least a bit on Sagan. Great guy, but got a swelled head. Here we have less of NDT and more of much better illustrations.
I’m looking forward the the rest of the episodes.
Oh, the best part of the talk was his response to, with such advanced technology, why don’t we have huge advancements in science.
I quite enjoyed the show–will watch as it goes into further detail. Yes, there are commercials–I’m not watching to have a religious experience.
The Bruno segment informed us that the Calvinists, Lutherans & Anglicans also rejected his beliefs. Alas, he decided to return to Rome. None of the major denominations are now anti-science. Perhaps the minds of a few Biblical Inerrancy fans will get expanded…
What I’ve seen of the show struck me as gee-whiz unscientific commercialism. What’s with the lightning tour of the solar system? Does anyone actually learn anything or is it just graphics to impress children and morons?
One strong objection: as with most depictions of the big bang, they show some sort of explosion, sound effects and all. This is unbelievably misleading. Space time began and began expanding. There was nothing “outside” it to view it from. It was not an explosion. It would if you could be in it and somehow survive, be just a simple expansion of subatomic particles and later bits of matter.
Why do they have to persist in showing something so completely wrong and, worse, completely misleading.
Actually, that part was accurate. He wasn’t burned at the stake for his views of the Universe except that they became and form of Pantheism which went hand-in-hand with his denial of basics of the Christian faith and he and did indeed turn from the Crucifix during his execution.
As a thoroughly orthodox Nicene Christians, even I can lament the dickishness of Church authorities through the ages.
Well I kinda wondered why they picked Bruno: he was a fanatic who based his beliefs on a vision, not on any kind of scientific reasoning (unless you think Lucretius is scientific, which he is in a sort of poetic way – the universe must be infinite or we would all have reached bottom by now). Men like Galileo and Newton and Copernicus should get the attention, as they were the path setters.
Two theories: one was to get a dig in at the Church and its Medieval brutality (which it deserves); the other was that Sagan had already used up the really good figures and they wanted someone different.
I understand and acknowledge these points about what, to be as generous as I can bring myself to be, I would describe as the “necessary evil” of showing it on network prime-time TV, but mostly because Druyan, et. al., had been shopping it around for years and found no takers until MacFarlane pushed it to the Fox people.
If you insist that Druyan deliberately and explicitly decided against airing it on PBS, I’ll tentatively take your word for it, but I retain some doubts (or at least major disappointment). PBS in general, and Nova in particular, is in ***desperate ***need of a rebirth, because it hasn’t produced a science show in years – it’s little more than another unimpressive technology showcase – and a new *Cosmos *would have done just that! Sure, not many people watch PBS, but that’s hardly new, even if shows like Frontline are the very finest out there. More to the point, developing and airing a new Cosmos would have brought PBS multitudes of **new **viewers, re-invigorating the most pro-science and objective information source this country has to offer! I personally feel that Ann Druyan should feel at least a little shame.
As for the repeated argument here that airing it on Fox (or the National Geographic channel, which has sunk so abysmally low to the tragic point that it’s just another vehemently anti-science, pro-crackpot clone of the gob-smackingly ***putrid ***Discovery / TLC / ID / Science / History Channels, where nothing gets on the air unless it is filled with complete and utter lies and/or anti-scientific bullshit) will interest and intrigue a lot of people to pay attention and actually lead them to try to learn some science, I’m just not buying it (at least not for more than a very few). Why not? The same reason I posited above: The fact that they had to break off interest and concentration and narrative flow to make room for all the commercials!
Please understand: With this I’m not seeking to bash consumerism or free enterprise or network TV or make other similar social-political criticisms. My great concern is that the content of the show has been chopped into such small, disjointed bits that it becomes blurred with the commercials themselves; requires too much effort to distinguish from the rest of the noise; severely damages comprehension; stops contemplation cold; decimates any narrative (and narrative hooks); turns it into yet another disjointed pile of immediately forgotten mainstream pablum; and again just slides along with the rest of the rabid anti-intellectualism of our time.
Curiously, SeaDragonTattoo acknowledges this tragic state of affairs even as he criticizes my arguments and tells me to shut up about it. He/she describes “modern sound-bite audiences who are constantly multi-tasking, and whose attention is difficult to keep”, who “have their phones, laptops, and tablets going at the same time as the show”. Yep, that’s our modern anti-intellectual cultural catastrophe, all right. So why surrender to it? Why reinforce it?
Even with its far larger viewership compared to PBS, network TV with commercials over the last decade (or arguably several decades now) hasn’t measurably educated and enlightened very many people at all (and has probably made things considerably worse), especially compared to long-segment TV without commercials (PBS and all the streaming options), and I think it’s quite unlikely (perhaps even ludicrous) to think things will be any different with the new Cosmos chopped up and spewed out this way.
Network, commercial-laden TV has the same effect on me, too: A commercial comes on and I quickly forget what was going on in the narrative and start thinking about dozens of unrelated things. My concentration has been damaged by it, if not demolished. It’s the worst way imaginable to communicate!
I need to go now, but before I go, I’d like to point out that none of the posters I’ve quoted above has made any comment on a key point I raised above in response to MsRobyn: “And it’s not all that uncommon for the major traditional networks to air some programs with little or no commercial interruptions, so there’s really not much excuse for butchering it so.”
Bye for now…
From this interview, it sounds like Bruno was someone they wanted to talk about in the original, but never got to it.
And there is no such thing as a cosmic calendar you can step from to the present or the Big Bang, and no spaceship can make it to the local cluster in under a minute.
Yeah, let’s make it really popular by just showing the equations.
Hell, they talked about the opaque phase, which is pretty uncommon in short summaries of the early universe. Though they didn’t talk about inflation - yet.
How would you propose to show this in a way which will get people interested enough to check further?