Well, I then have to point out that you are also tossing Carl Sagan under the bus.
(bolding mine)
I think I begin to understand why Sagan was just appreciated, but not very well by his fellow scientists of the day, I would have to say that there was a little bit of jealousy for him being very capable of explaining science to the people.
Of course there is no jealousy here but absolutism, besides the dictionary allowing for the use of “explosion” in this case, you are like a hammer that only sees nails; People that make science popular have to make things simple so people, but more importantly children, will be inspired to follow science and then learn more later about the proper scientific terms and make humanity progress.
At the instant the universe came into existence, it was infinite in size and filled everywhere with a dense, hot fog of subatomic particles. As time passed, space itself stretched, cooling the fog and dispersing it.
I doubt it. Everyone loves the stupid explosion metaphor so much. Explosions are fun! Yay!
I bet they also get the cosmic red shift wrong: “Things that are far away are red-shifted because they’re moving away from us so fast! Because of the Big Bang explosion, don’t you know!”
That will happen when he will notice that Carl Sagan himself called it a “titanic explosion”. Then we all should duck and take cover for all the expanding biological matter tossed all over.
I used to think red shift due to dark energy expansion was the same as Doppler Effect. I found it interesting and read more.
I used to read comic books as a kid. I immediately started reading more and pointing out how ridiculous comics physics is. That’s not totally unlike listening to Bruno and deciding to find out more.
And the visual to this is?
Inside you see nothing. There is no outside.
The first step is to convince people it really happened. Then we can talk about inflation.
And remember that the term"Big Bang" was coined by Hoyle, no fan of the theory.
It wouldn’t have been that hard to show something more accurate. The universe pops into existence as a big bright red cloud that fills the whole screen. “We can’t show you the edge because the universe doesn’t have an edge … the hot cloud filled the entire universe.” You highlight a few particles in the cloud and show them spreading farther apart as the cloud gets thinner and cools from orange to yellow to transparent.
But, of course, it’s not as exciting as an explosion. Pow! Boom! Yay, science!
It is hard to be anti-scientific before there is science.
The show made it pretty clear that his ideas were based on religion, not science or even reason. And they also made it clear that he was correct by accident. So I fail to see where they held Bruno up as someone to be emulated. They also made it clear that he was kicked out of every place he went, and that he was nuts to return to Italy.
Revolutionary science requires two things - the imagination to see things in a different way, and the discipline to work through the idea and provide convincing evidence of it. Bruno had the first but certainly not the second. Most of the audience is not going to have the second, but anyone can have the first. Especially since the Church dogma at the time was so limiting.
Galileo has been done and done, especially know that we know that much of Galileo’s troubles were of his own making, for instance by putting the accepted dogma in the mouth of a simpleton in his book.
It also is a nice lesson about looking at the ideas, not the person. That Bruno was a crackpot didn’t make his ideas wrong.
But that was during the opaque phase - no red, light didn’t make it far enough to show anything. Cosmos at least showed it was black before cooling made the universe not too dense for light to penetrate anything.
Good thing I didn’t do that. I brought up the dictionary definition of “explosion” to prove that the Big Bang really was an explosion, not to defend misleading people.
Calling it “inflation” (or “expansion”) doesn’t help. Both of those terms are just as capable of leading to misunderstanding. There are not any more clear or accurate than “explosion”.
So, either the host needs to go into detail about how something was an explosion, but not a normal sort of explosion (or an inflation, but not a normal sort of inflation, etc.), or they stick with the simple version.
It’s best to do the first; that way is more precise. But neither is inaccurate.
It’s colored red to show that it’s HOT. You can explain if you need to: “We colored it red to show how HOT it was! If you’d actually been there you couldn’t have seen ANYTHING! The hot fog was too thick!”
It’s been my experience that the explosion metaphor actually gets in the way of convincing people that the Big Bang happened. I’ve seen creationists on this very board try to argue against the Big Bang based on misconceptions arising from the explosion metaphor such as: “What was the explosion exploding into?”
There’s nothing special about the word “explosion” (or “inflation”, or “expansion”, or “growth”) that makes creationists disbelieve. They will be happy to disbelieve regardless of a single word choice.
[QUOTE=The Hamster King]
It’s been my experience that the explosion metaphor actually gets in the way of convincing people that the Big Bang happened. I’ve seen creationists on this very board try to argue against the Big Bang based on misconceptions arising from the explosion metaphor such as: “What was the explosion exploding into?”
[/QUOTE]
I love it when creationists fall back on science. Win.
