The very modern day religious right is precisely why every generation needs to hear about Bruno et. al. If Bruno is religion-bashing, the Holocaust is merely conservative bashing.
Well, everyone knows Jesus was a wizard.
And Neil deGrasse Tyson is a black Carl Sagan.
Bruno didn’t reach his ideas be standard scientific methods, yes. But at the time he did have a radical and visionary idea and the only argument against it was that the current attitude was “Aristotle or GTFO”.
I won’t argue, but it isn’t like there isn’t enough attention paid to these guys already.
In that linked video, I loved his response to the question as to why he omitted Pluto. After a couple funny retorts about only being an accessory to Pluto’s demotion, he says, “Its orbit crosses Neptune’s. No other planet does that. That’s just creepy.”
Good laughs on that one.
I liked the pilot, that said, I have some bigger expectations of subsequent deeper episodes, and though the pilot may have been a bit of a weak start, it was expertly done. I’m excited about the rest of this series and wish I could binge-watch it the way I can now with Sagan’s.
I hear ya screaming on a lot of points. I’ve loved Cosmos since it originally aired. I own his heavily illustrated book on it, and have the original series, and even loved the VFX enhanced version they spat out a few years ago.
But I really have to wait until the rest of the series is over until I work up any ire over any qualms I have at the moment. Getting a series made of any type is next to impossible, so I’ll cut them some slack if they had to compromise a bit with Fox to get this made.
Isn’t that what all commercial TV is these days? The supposed content so bent around the ad breaks that everything is delivered in 8- to 12-minute “acts”? Each ending with the biggest possible cliffhanger to keep you from tuning out? And not on any fixed schedule or length, no - because that would make them too easy to zap.
I think the only reason you notice is because they’re trying to show real content instead of Honey Boo Boo’s latest accident or some shitcom’s lame recycled attempt at humor.
I think some of it was just that his ideas fit the theme of the episode. Regardless of how he came to his conclusions, he had a fairly modern view of the Cosmos, and Cosmos is the title of the program.
And I don’t think the fact that his ideas were largely theological rather then scientific takes away from the point that its hard to advance our understanding of the universe when the authorities will burn you at the stake for thought-crimes.
I also think Bruno’s story is poignant because Bruno was a religiously devout man. The enormity of the university only strengthened his conviction of God’s power and wonder. I think it was a way of showing that being a scientist and being a believer in Mystery do not have to conflict.
In other words, it was a way of showing the religious viewers in the audience that it’s alright for them to be fascinated by the cosmos just as Bruno was. And if they are troubled by the enormity of the universe (and the insignificance of human beings, in the grand scheme of things), maybe they are confining God to too small a box. (“Your god is too small!”)
Same – let’s not get too caught up in it. That production was a creation of its time and a reboot that the younger generations could dig was in order. Some bits of the original were clever, some were so-so, some aged well, some did not. Ann Druyan has gotten into the guardian of the legacy role all these years not with the eyes of a curator protecting an icon but of someone who wants to reiterate the points that were made, and though there was a “refresh” of the original a while back, it really needed bringing up to date as a whole to do so.
Whether this is a really succesful attempt is yet to be seen. I don’t find the first episode enough to judge that, though sure, I have some things I like, dislike and am left scratching my head about.
The calendar is a good update of something Sagan had brought up in the original and gets refreshed. The spaceship-of-imagination IMO is not. The Bruno animation, eh, I am of two minds - the trouble with using the old-time science-heretics is that a bunch of them were also real heresy-heretics and sometimes got into trouble as much for stating a dissident position as for being a pest about it. Bruno’s an example of the courage required to question orthodoxy – but at the same time he was questioning it out of what we would call “woo”, and he was NOT a put-upon philosopher guy, he was an abrasive and combative rebel. Neil deGrasse Tyson himself… I dunno, I felt like he was too consciously trying to avoid “playing” Sagan (which yes he should avoid) but OTOH I did not feel he was really showing me Tyson, let’s see that in the next episodes.
Are you a retard? Because this makes you look like you’re a retard. Only a retard would think the ship looks like Boba Fetts’ spaceship. Clearly the ship is a replica of the ship from “Flight of the Navigator”. Also your grammar is shit. Shit like a retard. So you come off as a Double Dare Double Decker Retard. Fuck nose.
Maybe no one commented on it because it’s not true. Are you thinking of the Sunday Disney Movie from how the hell long ago? Are you thinking of one-off TV movies or mini-series, that perhaps had one major sponsor per night, which in turn dropped millions on exclusive commercial rights? Who is going to do that for a 13 episode run of Cosmos which may or may not flop, and is certainly not going to draw the ratings of a summer mini-series?
You sound like a very old man with a huge wedgie, shaking a myopic fist at a crowd of passers-by.
It was definitely NOT an explosion, as I’ve explained in my OP. An explosion requires something to explode into, and nothing existed for the Big Bang to explode into.
What term would I have used instead? Easy! Inflation! Not only is that vastly more accurate, it is just as easy for the average person to understand. But the real bonus is that using that term would have made my complaint in my OP – “NGT didn’t even mention inflation!” – completely moot.
This is a 13 part series. There’ll be plenty of opportunities for more detailed examinations of certain topics.
The point here was to orientate the viewer in time and space. The rest comes later.
Here’s a thought experiment for you, professor ambushed:
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and all the producers of Cosmos…
[ol]
[li]honestly don’t understand that there was no space for the Big Bang to explode into.[/li][li]thought that inflation was kinda underselling to the general audience the staggeringly rapid amount of energy expelled.[/li][/ol]
One of the biggest problems scientists have in communicating with the public is the kind of obsession with details that nonetheless fail to convey the implications of the mechanics in a way that average people understand. It appears to me that the producers are trying to avoid that pitfall. Feel free to be as stubborn as you like, but you are making yourself look like an out-of-touch pedant.
Cosmos: A Pedantic Monologue hosted by Sheldon Cooper sounds like a hit to me.
The Bruno segment was not factually accurate. And he was a terrible choice for inclusion, given Ann Druyan’s emphasis on promoting skepticism (as she has said in an interview).
Before I go on, Tyson (or should I say “deGrasse Tyson”?) appeared on Colbert the Monday night after the first airing, and when Colbert challenged him on the “Church-bashing” portion, Tyson first insisted it was no such thing because he emphasized that the Church did not actually kill Bruno, but rather the “Roman authorities” did. But a short while later, he kinda-sorta backtracked and admitted that that the Church did order him to be burned at the stake, so it seems at least a bit that he wanted it both ways. So, a point or two off for disingenuousness…
But back to my main thrust: Why was the Bruno segment such a terrible choice, given Sagan’s (in the original) and Druyan’s declared emphasis on including strong skepticism into the new Cosmos? Because Bruno was a mind-bogglingly gullible crackpot! An anti-scientific crackpot who would be completely at home today in the woo-filled milieu of ultra-asshole-cranks like Deepak Chopra, Fritjof Capra, Erich von Däniken, Stanislaw Burzynski, Rupert Sheldrake, Andrew Wakefield, Daryl Bem, Dean Radin, etc. etc. etc. And what’s more, everyone in his day knew that too! He was a major historical laughingstock, in large part because he not only had little or no respect for evidence, he pretty much had contempt for evidence! He was pretty much making shit up or borrowing frosh-dorm bullshit from other crackpots (Oh, wow, man! I am Metaluna!)
Yes, Tyson said, a bit too sotto voce in my opinion, that Bruno was not a scientist. So why not do some Church-bashing based on someone who was a scientist, like Galileo? Probably because Galileo was only sentenced to comfortable house arrest, rather than having to undergo a death that was better suited to ludicrously over-dramatic cheap-ass cartoons!
You just don’t get it, do you? First, if you listened closely to the trial scene, you could hear the judge charge Bruno with the theological crimes he was put to death for, like denying Jesus.
True Bruno was not a scientist. Science as a discipline hardly existed. What Bruno did do was push out against the limits of what was accepted then, and for what I think most today were sound theological reasons. Even the most fundamental of fundamentalists wouldn’t argue that God is limited to the sphere the Church accepted then.
And Tyson clearly said that he was right because he got lucky, not from reasoning. So it is not like Cosmos is holding Bruno up as a model scientist. They are holding him up as the model of someone who, to coin a phrase, could think differently. Which anyone can do without a PhD in astrophysics.
Wrong. Emphatically Wrong! Here are just a few high-quality cites…
From Cornell, Carl Sagan’s alma mater: : In fact, the Big bang was not an explosion at all; it was simply the very hot state of the early universe
From the Angry Astronomer, complaining about the enormous misrepresentation of referring to the Big Bang as an explosion: [Misrepresentation Number 1) The Big Bang was an explosion
From NASA: No, the Big Bang was not an explosion.
Can we stop being willfully wrong about this, please?
Nothing inspires the young’ns like an expansion of the space time manifold from a singular point at time equals zero to a four dimensional manifold growing with time.
And lose the sound effects in space! :mad: