Cosmos: A Waste of Spacetime

The BBQ Pit
101

Sheesh! You just don’t get it, do you? Did you even read my post with any care before responding? Didn’t you notice anything I wrote about Bruno being an ignorant, anti-skeptical, anti-scientific crackpot? Which should have disqualified him from consideration – let alone granting him such a large segment – given that the prime mover of the new Cosmos emphasized that skepticism must be a key part of the program?

You want more evidence of his ultra-crackpottery, even for his day?

Galileo mocked him and his writings, even as so-called “philosophy”. Kepler had no respect for him either.

He argued that native Americans were descended from “a second Adam”, and thus unworthy and inferior beings. He worshiped Thoth, an Egyptian deity.

The new Cosmos disingenuously suggests he was martyred in part because he read ‘banned’ books, like Lucretious. But no one got in trouble – let alone was martyred – because he read or spoke of Lucretious, which contained only utterly preposterous bullshit, and wasn’t rare and wasn’t controversial, just stupid.

And as a side note, there’s this:

When will you get it?

102

The post to which you’re responding was in response to all the posters who kept insisting that the Big Bang was an explosion, or was plenty close enough. They’re completely wrong.

But when asked which term I would have used to a low-brow general audience, I already posted my reply above: I would use the word “inflation”, and the decades-old image of an inflating balloon with galaxies painted on the outside (like surely we’ve all seen dozens of times already) would have been extremely easily understood.

103

You deliberately left out the far more rational alternative, which I addressed very early in the thread, as follows:

And to be pedantic, what you did there is commonly termed The False Dilemma fallacy.

And you are blithely defending bullshit and unnecessarily dumbed-down ignorance. I’ll take the epithet “pedant” over that any day.

104

ambushed, you are factually correct. Shame on me for not having mentioned that until now.

I hope that, as a science enthusiast, you will appreciate that there are scientific principles to communication. And that the challenges for a scholarly pursuit like science are twofold in a world that is rife with magical thinking. In the ongoing challenge to turn people back to science, communicators have to balance slavish detail to scientific exactitude with “user-friendly” metaphor to get their point across and keep someone from turning the channel back to Duck Dynasty. When we communicate, we must speak in terms our audience can understand. The audience for this television show that follows a two-hour block of cartoons are not astrophysics students. They include people who might still think the sun revolves around the earth. You may disagree with the choice they made, but I hope you can respect the experience that NDT et al have with science communication and appreciate they have reasons for the choices they made.

Given the real-world gulf between astrophysics and biblical literalism, I hope you can appreciate that the difference between terms like explosion, expansion, inflation, eruption, snowballing, or embiggening is small potatoes.

For some interesting listening, I encourage you to give a listen to Robert Krulwich’s CalTech commencement speech about science communication. It scratches the surface of where I’m coming from.

105

As for choosing Bruno, Druyan said they wanted a lesser known figure; I guess that’s why they didn’t go with the usual Galileo.

106

You really are a cretinous yahoo, aren’t you? “Sunday Disney Movie”? Sheesh.

After just a bit of googling, here’s a list of just a few of the programs that were aired with limited commercial interruptions in recent years:

Cane, Sep 25, 2007

Heroes, Sep 24, 2007

Hoarders, Jul 28, 2009

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sep, 2008

Big Daddy (Adam Sandler abomination), USA Network, Mar 17, year unknown

Mad Men Season Three Premiere, AMC, Aug 16, 2009

Diary of a Mad Black Woman, TNT, Nov 14, 2010

Why We Dance: The Story of THON, Feb 12, 2013

*Milk *(Sean Penn biopic of Harvey Milk), USA, June 1, 2013

Helix, SyFy Channel, Jan 10, 2014

Dr. Who Marathon, BBC America, Dec 24 & 25, 2012?

Skins, MTV, Jan 24, 2011

Teen Wolf Marathon, Jan 6, 2014

So what you’re essentially arguing is that Teen Wolf, Hoarders, and Big Daddy are all significantly more worthy of airing with limited commercial interruption than the new Cosmos. That even just airing the *pilot *episode with a modicum of respect (with minimal interruptions) is utterly outrageous to consider, and doing so makes me “sound like a very old man with a huge wedgie, shaking a myopic fist at a crowd of passers-by”?

Yep, you’re a lackwit philistine, all right.

107

:confused:

Oh, Dear! I’m so sorry! I didn’t realize that you were “special”. But take heart: they say that “slow and steady wins the race”, although I doubt they expected anyone to be quite that slow… :smack:

108

If so, I hope he was promptly corrected by more nuanced scientists. Beyond the fact that these are very different contexts, the term “Cambrian Explosion” is also a rather regrettable misnomer, despite Stephen Jay Gould’s captivating but rather misleading book on the subject.

Maybe it’s just me, but referring to an “event” which took ~30 million years to transpire as an “explosion” strikes me as being at least a bit presumptuous, or am I too unforgiving in this? The reality is that that wrong-headed phrase has gifted creationists and ID’ers with untold millions of words of gleeful, anti-evolution bullshit to blather about endlessly. It would have been far better had that spurious phrase never been invented.

109

I know that’s what Cosmos said, but do we actually know that? Here’s one source that disagrees. I quote from The Giordano Bruno page from The Galileo Project at Rice University:
[QUOTE=The Galileo Project]
In fact, we do not know the exact grounds on which he was declared a heretic because his file is missing from the records.
[/QUOTE]

110

All language is about analogies. There is no way to explain new things without making metaphoric statements. Describing the Big Bang as an explosion is an analogy. For that matter, calling it “the Big Bang” is an analogy. Why don’t you object to the term “the Big Bang” as much? It also implies that it’s an explosion. It even implies that there was a noise that someone outside it could have heard. The term “inflation” is a metaphor too, and it’s not very good either. The most common use of the term “inflation” today is with respect to costs increasing, not costs appearing from nowhere. It also seems to say that something was there before and then increased in size. That’s also true of the inflation of a balloon, where the balloon existed before it was blown up. Look, read this book:

It’s a long introduction to the concept that all statements in natural human language about new things are necessarily analogies. The notion that we can use language in a totally logical manner in which every new statement can be treated as if it were a statement in mathematical logic from which any true consequence can be derived in a series of deductions is wrong. You object because you think the program doesn’t seem to know enough about physics, but you clearly don’t know much about linguistics. You’re complaining because calling the Big Bang an explosion is not true to the best physical descriptions of it. Yes, you’re right, and it’s also true that natural human language is not like mathematical logic. No statement about a completely new concept can ever be anything except an analogy. There is no alternative in explaining the Big Bang (or any concept that someone hasn’t heard of before) except by starting by describing it with an analogy and then slowly explaining why the analogy is not very good.

111

Thank you for this link. It really was excellent.

ambushed, if you didn’t listen to the podcast, the gist was this:

Most people don’t evaluate claims based on evidence and rational discernment; they go with what simply sticks in their minds. The most compelling story wins.

Some people feel that it’s somehow a sell-out move to make things accessible. But the point is that if you want to win the battle against creationists, say, you have to tell a great story first and foremost.

112

You are right about Bruno (and about the fact that people did not get martyred just for reading Lucretius, or anything else). Bruno actually had to try quite hard to get himself burned at the stake. He could have stayed out of Italy, or stayed where he was in Venice, and he would not have been arrested. Even after he was arrested, he was repeatedly offered the chance to recant his heretical views and be set free, but he refused. (Heliocentrism, incidentally, was not declared a heresy until several years after Bruno’s execution, and nobody was ever punished for being a heliocentrist except Galileo and maybe one other guy who got a slap on the wrist. By the standards of the time, Galileo’s punishment was a slap on the wrist too.)

However, you are quite wrong about Lucretius’ significance. His work is by far the most complete account of ancient atomism to survive from the ancient world, and played a very important role in stimulating the sorts of new thinking about the nature of matter and causality in the 17th century that led to modern science.

Bruno, however, just liked weird, far-out ideas, of which Copericanism was, at the time, one.

113

If the big bang explosion tactic is to be overlooked because it is an analogy, why can’t they at least tell us that and explain that it is not possible to actually show it.

What we get instead is something that misleads the uninformed: the overwhelming majority. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to deal with “what was before or outside the big bang” and then had such a program cited to me as proof I am wrong when I say nothing, not even space or time.

114

There’s a book out there called Made to Stick that I’d recommend to anyone who wants to be an effective communicator of ideas.

People need to be able to connect what they don’t understand with what they do understand. “Sorry, the big bang is so abstract and unrelatable that we can’t give you an image to latch onto… on a television show, no less” just isn’t going to cut it on show designed to make science more approachable. This should go without saying.

115

Making the Big Bang Explosion more interesting.

116

I’m combining this reply primarily to raise what I think is a particularly important point (that I thought of the other night but forgot to address here) in response to all the criticisms of my emphasizing that the Big Bang was NOT an “explosion” (and it will be my last post till later tonight).

Thanks, Wendell, for such a thoughtful reply!

Although I’m not particularly impressed with the often pompous and muddle-headed George Lakoff, I certainly take and concede your larger point, in general.

But let’s hear from Lobot before I reply more fully…

And then from the equally thoughtful Frank Merton, with whom I emphatically agree:

Here’s my reply to these and similar points made earlier: By far, one of the most crucial lessons that everyone needs to grasp – no matter how familiar or unfamiliar one is with science – is that modern science is often extremely counter-intuitive! Before even beginning to learn anything truly important about the world, this lesson needs to be over-emphasized and repeatedly drilled into the fresh minds approaching the concepts of legitimate science, and I contend that the new Cosmos has so far failed utterly in that regard!

The origin of the Universe not resulting from an “explosion” is actually one of the easiest counter-intuitive concepts to get across. Creationism is intuitive, evolution by natural selection is not. A flat or nearly-flat Earth is intuitive, a semi-globular one is not. The illusion of solidity and similar basic physical interactions are intuitive, but even truly basic quantum mechanics is not. The list goes on and on!

I contend that the vast, endless error and confusion that so many billions of non-scientists are drowning in is a result of applying “intuition” where it simply doesn’t apply. The new Cosmos should have been at the forefront of making this crucial fact abundantly clear; that they’ve deliberately passed up the priceless opportunity does not speak well of it at all.

117

Indeed modern science is counter-intuitive, but you’ve gotta start somewhere. If you immediately start throwing abstract, counter-intuitive concepts at someone who isn’t used to tackling complex scientific theories, you’ve lost them. You won’t get to explain anything to them because they’ve already tuned out.

It’s OK to simplify things initially. That’s the entry point where the other person says, “Hey, I get this! I’m interested and ready for more!” And then you add layers of complexity as you go, easing them into the real story.

There’s only so much a 13-part series can deliver, but this was just the first episode–the initial, simplified introduction. There’s still another nine hours of content, and possible complexity, to come.

118

Yep. A modicum of respect to who? You? People like you? Since you and people like you are not the target audience, they don’t care. Respect to the producers? I’m quite certain they were thrilled to have every single sponsor putting down cash to air their commercials during their show.

In that list, there are what, three examples from broadcast TV. The two season premiers I checked are Cane, and I’m not finding a cite for it, care to direct me to the search terms needed to find it myself? And Hoarders didn’t air until August of 2009, so I’m not finding the cite for that one, either. Sorry I didn’t check further after the first two duds.

The other side of airing a show with limited commercials is getting a sponsor to spring for it. In the eyes of a multi-million dollar single sponsor, yes, already successful box office smashes, and subsequent-season premiers of known successful shows are indeed more worthy than the pilot of a potential flop, by a long shot.

And yes, your continued bitching about commercials on broadcast television just makes you look like an old biddy with panties in a twist. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. Watch it online, watch it on DVR, or put up with the stupid commercials that no one cares about.

Actually, I’d be interested to hear your take on a re-watch without the commercials, because I really didn’t find it choppy, or hurried. But I’m accustomed to modern editing.

119

You first.

The Big Bang was an explosion. I’ve already provided a definition of explosion that fits the Big Bang just fine. There’s nothing whatsoever inherent to the definition of an explosion that it must be exploding into anything. People (such as yourself) may mistakenly believe this, but that does not make it true. More importantly, the word “inflation” isn’t any less misleading.

Aside from the use of the term with respect to money, it is generally used to describe pumping air into tires or balloons. In each case, there must be a pre-existing substance that is being moved to a new location. If the universe is inflating, whose lips are on the balloon? What is it being inflated with? From where?

Saying “The Big Bang was an explosion - only it wasn’t exploding into anything” is no more confusing than “The Big Bang was an inflation - only it wasn’t being inflated with anything other than itself, and it wasn’t being inflated with anything from anywhere else, and nobody was doing the inflating.”

120

Inflation was over with when what we picture as the big bang happened (although maybe it is an ongoing process and the big bang was local).

When you say “explosion,” people think chemistry, or maybe atomic, but all that confuses them. Where did the energy of this “explosion” come from (and this is a rare but sometimes mentioned criticism).

Depending on dictionary definitions to defend things misleading people will not do. Languages have a range of meanings, some of which are central and some of which are figurative. Use of figurative meanings but failure to make this clear is a propaganda technique, not science, nor proper journalism, although they do it often.

Maybe I’m premature; maybe they will come back and fix some of this later. I’m not holding my breath. Also, the link they have engineered with Sagan is unfortunate. His aim clearly was to attack anti-Science, as how he showed the consequences of the victory of superstition over science in the fifth century. This seems to want to avoid controversy and simply produce a gee-whiz audience.

In the beginning there was nothing: really nothing – no space no time. This did not go on for eons either; there was no time. There cannot be a before the beginning.