Cosmos: A Waste of Spacetime

[SeaDragonTattoo]

@Athabasca

With respect, what is this thread doing in BBQ Pit? Isn’t Cafe Society the place for TV shows?

Oh, there’s a thread already in Cafe Society. The OP decided to pretty much copy the complaining he was doing in that thread and use it to start this one. Maybe to use stronger language? Who knows.

[Lobot]

The OP was almost exploding with outrage, but he didn’t want to explode into a thread with existing content. In hindsight, then, he chose to let a thread inflate in its own space instead.

[B.Serum]

(slow clap)

[Lobohan]

@B.Serum

(slow clap)

“It’s not a clap! It’s a percussive hand flap!!!1” — Ambushed

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

Am I the only one who noticed that Tyson did mention that the Big Bang created space (while also describing it as an explosion)? The graphics may have been misleading, but he did say that.

He also mentioned dark matter and inflation, in passing. I’m no genius, so how could I be the only person to notice?

As for Bruno, to me the story seems like a history of science episode. The Church model of the universe was absurd. Bruno, through observation and reasoning (and a dream-induced zeitgeist), came up with a new model that is generally correct. It is quasi-science at a time before science. Is that so wrong? Did they have to emphasize more that the guy was also a nutjob to make their point?

True, it is unfortunate for the show to present an either/or between science and faith, since really there is no conflict between conclusions arrived at proceeding from observations and repeatable experiments via the rules of logic and just believing whatever the guy in the pointy hat says

[B.Serum]

@Lobohan

“It’s not a clap! It’s a percussive hand flap!!!1” — Ambushed

“It’s a braking percussive hand flap!! Can we please stop being willfully imbecilic?!?!!??!?!”

[SeaDragonTattoo]

@Try2B_Comprehensive

Am I the only one who noticed that Tyson did mention that the Big Bang created space (while also describing it as an explosion)? The graphics may have been misleading, but he did say that.

He also mentioned dark matter and inflation, in passing. I’m no genius, so how could I be the only person to notice?

No, there’s just been too much material here for people to ignore so everyone’s running with the OP. Whether the OP noticed it or not, he may have, amongst the seething and hand waving, and dismissed it as insufficient for his sensibilities. Galileo was mentioned at the very end of the Bruno bit, too. A sufficient (to me) nod to what a different show may have covered and (to me) confirming the forethought they made in deciding to go with the Bruno story as “the very, very beginning.”

But what do I know, I’m a philistine. Oh, sorry, a lackwit too.

[cmyk]

@ambushed

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.

Sheldon?

[Frank_Merton]

How big was the big bang? Very, very small (at least the part of it that has ended up as the universe we can observe). Where did it happen? Everywhere.

[Wendell_Wagner]

Both the 1980 and the 2014 versions of Cosmos are very much products of their time. The 1980 version was dreamy and laid back, with a shaggy-haired host who spoke slowly and traveled in a spaceship that looked like an art student’s memory of a drug fantasy. The 2014 version is full of special effects and faster cuts like an action movie, with a host filmed to look like the hero of such a movie. Neither version, from the point of view of someone with even an enthusiastic amateur’s interest in astronomy, is really packed with information. They are both aimed at someone only starting to become interested in astronomy.

[Frank_Merton]

@Wendell_Wagner

Both the 1980 and the 2014 versions of Cosmos are very much products of their time. The 1980 version was dreamy and laid back, with a shaggy-haired host who spoke slowly and traveled in a spaceship that looked like an art student’s memory of a drug fantasy. The 2014 version is full of special effects and faster cuts like an action movie, with a host filmed to look like the hero of such a movie. Neither version, from the point of view of someone with even an enthusiastic amateur’s interest in astronomy, is really packed with information. They are both aimed at someone only starting to become interested in astronomy.

Excellent perception: pointed out things I hadn’t noticed.

The beginning of the latest version (the whiz-bang tour of the solar system) seemed to me a particular waste of time. Did anyone (considering the sort of person who will be watching) actually learn anything? It struck me as an exercise in computer graphics – a sort of tool looking for an application – and disconnected from the rest of the program.

[iiandyiiii]

Finally saw the show and I thought it was great. Very well done, and it provoked a lot of great questions from my non-science-educated spouse.

[iiandyiiii]

@Frank_Merton

Did anyone (considering the sort of person who will be watching) actually learn anything?

My wife did not know the composition of Saturn’s rings, nor the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, nor the huge number of moons.

[Lobot]

I think the point with the solar system sequence is to draw people in with a “Wow!” factor–to make the solar system a real place rather than a bunch of fuzzy photos.

And I’ve watched it with people who were both fully engaged and educated, especially regarding Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

It’s too easy for the rest of us to lose touch with what the average person knows. Remember: one–in-four Americans don’t know the Earth revolves around the Sun.

[Try2B_Comprehensive]

@Frank_Merton

Did anyone (considering the sort of person who will be watching) actually learn anything?

I learned that, in space, we are located in a supercluster. That right there pretty much answers all my bigger questions.

[levdrakon]

@iiandyiiii

My wife did not know the composition of Saturn’s rings, nor the size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, nor the huge number of moons.

Their visualization of the GRS was worth the whole episode. Absolutely awe inspiring. I’ve read about it tons of times but there is no substitute for getting to “see” it like that.

[madmonk28]

I didn’t hate it. It was an intro to science program for a nation that increasingly sees science as heretical.

[MeanJoe]

I just saw it and I really enjoyed it. Never saw the original Sagan’s Cosmos. I honestly do not get the criticisms in this thread, you people sound like you’d take the joy out of a blow-job.

This was the first episode, the extended trailer so to speak, to set a context, capture people’s interest, and build some level of fascination/awe to bring them back for the next 12 episodes.

I enjoyed the Galactic Tour, it was great for setting up the scale of the universe. I also thought it played nicely against the calendar which set up the scale of time and our place within that timeline. I was not ignorant of this information but it resonated with me and drew some emotional response of awe, insignificance, perspective, and contemplation.

The animation of the red spot on Jupiter was stunning and I did not realize it was 3x the size of earth. Another moment of “Oh wow!” and leaves me wondering what else in the future episodes I’ll learn that I didn’t know before.

[Martin_Hyde]

@Wendell_Wagner

Both the 1980 and the 2014 versions of Cosmos are very much products of their time. The 1980 version was dreamy and laid back, with a shaggy-haired host who spoke slowly and traveled in a spaceship that looked like an art student’s memory of a drug fantasy. The 2014 version is full of special effects and faster cuts like an action movie, with a host filmed to look like the hero of such a movie. Neither version, from the point of view of someone with even an enthusiastic amateur’s interest in astronomy, is really packed with information. They are both aimed at someone only starting to become interested in astronomy.

I’ve not seen the new one but I agree 100% about the original.

Any adult or even decently smart teenager who just had a hobbyist interest in science and reading about the origins of the universe, who consumed the various layman magazines and such of the era would have learned little to absolutely nothing from the original Cosmos. It was a cool show but I was well into adulthood when it came out and I remember thinking it’d be a good way to give a 10th grader a nice intro to the subject but it was certainly not “real” education. It was like a survey course done really well. But even aspects of how it was done could be criticized as there was a ton of wasted air time.

I’ve not watched the new one, but it sounds like some people only remember their perception of the original Cosmos as children and thought they were going to get an undergraduate, 200-300 level course type content. That wasn’t what the original Cosmos was about and I wouldn’t have expected it in the new one. Sagan’s “mission” was complete the day you were signed up for a 200-300 level college science course on your way to graduating with a STEM degree, Cosmos was just something to maybe nudge kids in that direction and perhaps build passion for learning about this stuff in the adults who watched it. Its role wasn’t to create people who could communicate on equal terms with a Ph.D. physicist by the end of the series and I’d expect the new Cosmos has similar goals.

The OP and Frank Merton are having some of the most ridiculous Asperger-rage child flip outs I’ve seen about something like this. Just seeing their childish infant-rage made this thread worth the price of admission.

[ambushed]

This is in response to all the posts and posters here who continue to be stridently determined to be deliberately WRONG about the Big Bang.

We Americans live in a particularly wrong-headed and anti-intellectual culture. See…
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions
The Age of American Unreason
Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, etc., etc.

And not only are our science textbooks replete with serious errors (for just one article, see: Study finds errors rife in science textbooks), but whenever someone tries to correct these errors and misapprehensions, Americans rush to attack them, calling them “elites”, “know-it-alls”, “pedants” and the like.

One way this is illustrated is by all the credulous dupes here adamantly insisting that referring to the Big Bang as an “explosion” is just fine, even for Tyson to mislead and deceive and re-confirm people in their ignorance (which is supposed to not be what this site is all about!)

I will not retract or apologize for pointing out and trying to correct Tyson’s error, even though, apparently, Carl Sagan made the same foolish error in his book. (And to the poster(s) who ludicrously imagined that my head would “explode” or I would be otherwise humiliated by the sad fact of Sagan’s error, it is to laugh. After one scientist publicly made this foolish blunder, only a fool would imagine that justifies a second one making the same mistake!

So, here’s a more complete list of public corrections of the utterly wrong-headed claim that referring to the Big Bang as an “explosion” is “good enough” for the new Cosmos…
From Wikipedia’s entry on the Big Bang

The Big Bang is not an explosion…

From PhysicsForums

Big Bang - is a solution to Einstein equations, and it does not have any properties of an explosion. Nobody [ever] was thinking about the ‘explosion’. The image of ‘something exploding into empty space’ comes from very bad popularisations…

An explosion is a pop sci description of the origin of the universe.

But if we look at General Relativity, it is even easier than that. There are no solutions where there is empty space for some time, then something ‘explodes’ in that space, creating matter.

… [The] scientific community is to blame for common misconceptions, not pop science. If you call something “Big Bang” then you should expect questions about explosion…

From Deep Astronomy - What caused the Big Bang?

The big bang is our current, most accepted theory for how the universe began. It was inspired by the discovery that the universe is expanding.

It was an unusual and highly counterintuitive event. It was not an explosion, it did not occur inside anything, rather, everything that we are familiar with: left, right, up, down, cause and effect, the stage for all physical laws, was getting larger.

From Space.com - How it all started

The Big Bang was not an explosion in space, as the theory’s name might suggest.

From A Brief Introduction to the Ekpyrotic Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt, Princeton University

What is the Big Bang model?

To the public, the model means that the universe began from a single point, underwent an explosion, and has been flying apart ever since.

However, the big bang is not an explosion at all. This is an unfortunate misnomer that cosmologists would like to correct. But the bad name has stuck. [With the latest blame going to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey -ambushed]

From Talk.Origins - Common misconceptions about the Big Bang

In most popularized science sources, BBT is often described with something like “The universe came into being due to the explosion of a point in which all matter was concentrated.” Not surprisingly, this is probably the standard impression which most people have of the theory…

There are several misconceptions hidden in these statements:

The BBT is not about the origin of the universe. Rather, its primary focus is the development of the universe over time.
BBT does not imply that the universe was ever point-like.
***The origin of the universe was not an explosion*** of matter into already existing space.

…

There are a number of reasons that these misconceptions persist in the public mind. First and foremost, the term “Big Bang” was originally coined in 1950 by Sir Fred Hoyle, a staunch opponent of the theory. He was a proponent of the competing “Steady State” model and had a very low opinion of the idea of an expanding universe. Another source of confusion is the oft repeated expression “primeval atom”. This was used by Lemaitre (one of the theory’s early developers) in 1927 to explain the concept to a lay audience, albeit one that would not be familiar with the idea of nuclear bombs for a few decades to come. With these and other misleading descriptions endlessly propagated by otherwise well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) media figures [such as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey -ambushed], ***it is not surprising that many people have wildly distorted ideas about what BBT says. Likewise, the fact that many in the public think the theory is rather ridiculous is to be expected, given their inaccurate understanding of the theory and the data behind it. ***

…

The standard misconception of the Big Bang is that of an explosion of matter into already existing space. This is not the case. Rather, BBT holds that Spacetime itself expanded. Obviously, any statements accompanied by the claim that the Big Bang exploded to create order need to be taken with a grain of salt.

From UCLA - Where was the center of the Big Bang?

The Big Bang has no center. It is not an explosion radiating from a point. In an explosion you get an expanding spherical shell of fragments…

You might think that by backtracking the velocity vectors you can locate the center of the Big Bang (and it is at A) ***but this is not the case! ***

From NASA’s Foundations of Big Bang Cosmology

Please keep in mind the following important points to avoid misconceptions about the Big Bang and expansion:

The Big Bang did not occur at a single point in space as an “explosion.” It is better thought of as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe.

From Scientopia - “Big Bang” : A terrible name for a great theory

So why is the Big Bang a terrible name? Because the name itself evokes and supports many misconceptions about the theory…

The Big Bang was not an explosion.

The name suggests an explosion: some point that blew up, and everything outside it is now rushing away from it due to the force of the explosion. It’s an analogy that does provide some useful intuition (without Dark Energy, the Universe is expanding because of the left over expansion that started way back when and hasn’t been stopped by gravity), but there are a lot of problems with it. Most notably, galaxies are not in fact flying away from each other! A much more modern way to look at it, and a way that matches the mathematics that physicists and astronomers really use when they work with the model of the expanding Universe, is that galaxies (except for little local motions) are pretty much fixed, but space itself expands. Galaxies get farther apart from each other because, as space expands, there’s more space between them. (Note that the galaxies themselves are not expanding; they are held together by their own forces.) An analogy is rising raisin bread: the bread expands, and the raisins get farther apart, but the raisins aren’t moving through the bread. Another analogy would be pennies pasted on the surface of a balloon.

From Remodelling The Big Bang

Unquestionably, the most significant development that has taken place in cosmology in recent years is the replacement of the original Big Bang theory by a totally different hypothesis. The drastic nature of the conceptual change that is involved is well illustrated by comparing the following two statements:

[Old] According to this [Big Bang] theory, the outward motion of the galaxies was caused by an exploding ”atome primitif” which ejected them in all directions. (H. Alfven, 1966)

[New] Many people (including some scientists) think of the recession of the galaxies as due to the explosion of a lump of matter into a pre-existing void, with the galaxies as fragments rushing through space. ***This is quite wrong…*** the expanding universe is not the motion of the galaxies through space, away from some centre, but is the steady expansion of space. (Paul Davies, 1981)

The original version of the Big Bang provided an explanation of the expansion of the universe in terms of a known process, the explosion of an unstable aggregate of matter. Because of the gigantic extension of the scale of the explosive process that was required in order to apply it to the universe as a whole, this explanation was never very plausible, and its repudiation by a large segment of the astronomical community is readily understandable…

Some attempts have been made to extend the explosion concept to the space expansion hypothesis, and we occasionally hear expressions such as ”explosion of space itself.” But an explosion is a process of a specific nature, one in which energy in a concentrated form is suddenly converted to kinetic energy and applied to acceleration of the residual products. Inasmuch as the revised Big Bang is something of a totally different character, it is not an explosion.

Now that the original explosion explanation has been discarded, we need to find some other means of accounting for the observed outward motion of the galaxies…

From Chicago State University - The Big Bang

… The big bang was not an explosion. A common myth is that the big bang was an explosion that spewed matter out into the Universe. That is not true.

From RationalWiki/EvoWiki, debunking the bogus claim: “Explosions such as the Big Bang don’t produce order or information”

Responses… ***The Big Bang was not an explosion in any scientifically meaningful sense. Cosmological expansion is not explosive in nature. ***

From Physics & Universe: Standard Model of The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang: The creation process of the Universe began with an expansion, ***not an explosion as name suggests. ***

From Stardust: Supernovae and Life, by John & Mary Gribbin

In the 1930’s, a Belgian astrophysicist, George Lamaître,used the combination of observation and theory to come up with the first version of what we would now call the Big Bang model of the Universe. He talked in terms of a “primordial atom” (or sometimes “primeval egg”), containing all the mass of all the galaxies in the visible Universe, sitting alone in space and then suddenly breaking apart in an explosion, like the fission of a giant radioactive nucleus. This image encouraged other people to take up the investigation of the Big Bang – but in one respect it is a misleading one, since what Einstein’s equations tell us is that space itself is expanding. The Big Bang was not an explosion…

From Sloan Digital Sky Survey - The Big Bang

The “big bang” was not an explosion - it was just the time when the universe started expanding.

From The Most Important Things You Should Know About the Big Bang

The name was initially meant to be a dismissal

The term “big bang” was coined live on BBC radio in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, a scientific opponent to what was then the fringe “primeval atom” hypothesis proposed by Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre. Hoyle’s equally alliterative Steady State theory had been accepted by everyone from Einstein to Hubble, but contradicting discoveries in the 1920’s had slowly started to dismantle the erstwhile pillar of astronomical thought. Hoyle dismissed “this big bang idea” since it suggested that the universe had a beginning, implying to Hoyle that there was some sort of a creator. But both his straw man and his assumption fundamentally misrepresents what the Big Bang actually proposes.

Don’t think explosion, think expansion

From Knowledge Base > Science > Astronomy/Cosmology: Big Bang

Imagining the big bang as an explosion originating at a specific location in space, represents a gross violation of the cosmological principle…

… In most popularized science sources, BBT is often described with something like “The universe came into being due to the explosion of a point in which all matter was concentrated.” Not surprisingly, this is probably the standard impression which most people have of the theory. Occasionally, one even hears “In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded.”

There are several misconceptions hidden in these statements…

From Sean Carrol’s Cosmology Primer: Frequently Asked Questions

Does the universe have a center?

No. Our observable universe looks basically the same from the point of view of any observer. We see galaxies moving away from us in all directions, but an astronomer living in any one of those galaxies would also see all the galaxies (including our own) moving away from them. In particular, the Big Bang is not an explosion

that happened at some particular point in space; according to the Big Bang model, the entire universe came into existence expanding at every point all at once.
[/quote]

From The Big Bang Theory

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Big Bang Theory. The first one is in its name. The term “big bang” actually came about as a pejorative term while physicists were describing it. The “big bang” was more like a rapid expansion and not an “explosion”.

From New World Encyclopedia - Big Bang

[quote]
Hubble’s law has two possible explanations. Either we are at the center of an explosion of galaxies—

which is untenable given the Copernican principle—or the universe is uniformly expanding everywhere…

If the redshifts were the result of an explosion from a center distant from us, they would not be so similar in different directions…

The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill an empty universe. Instead, space itself expands with time everywhere and increases the physical distance between two comoving points.

From What’s in a name? In physics, everything and nothing

The “Big Bang” was an insult, not an explosion

It’s not just particles that get misleading titles. While the term “the Big Bang theory” evokes an image of a giant explosion, it was really a rapid expansion, not a singular blast, according to physicist and author Brian Greene of Columbia University.

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 Harvard

The Big Bang was not an explosion IN space. It was a process that involved ALL of space. This misconception causes more confusion than any other in cosmology. Unfortunately, many students, teachers, and scientists(!) mistakenly picture the “Big Bang” as an explosion that took place at some location in space, hurtling matter outward.

Physical Sciences > Physics > Quantum Gravity - The big bang was not an Explosion

The big bang was given it’s name by Fred Hoyle, in order to make the theory sound absurd. He metaphorically called it an explosion. ***In the mist of time most people even some scientist lost the metaphor part of that and thought of it as an explosion. Others then stopped using the metaphor because it confused people. ***

That said here is the shortest possible argument for why the big bang was not an explosion for anyone who needs convincing:

Explosions are the free expansion of material from higher, pressure, temperature and density to lower pressure, temperature and density in a short amount of time.

The big bang was the expansion of the space time manifold from a singular point at time equals zero to a four dimensional manifold growing with time. In the process the contents of the universe expanded to fill the new space that was created after the big bang.

***The big bang was not an explosion because no material was involved. None existed yet. The big bang was the sudden expansion of space-time. That is not the same as an explosion in any physical sense. ***

From The Angry Astronomer: The Big Bang – Common Misconceptions, complaining about the enormous misrepresentation of referring to the Big Bang as an explosion…

Recently, I’ve been hanging out on some message boards and realized that, just like with evolution, there’s a lot of really uneducated people that are being very vocal about their strawman version of the Big Bang. I began to notice that their entire argument was founded on these common misconceptions and thus, I figured it was about time to make a list of the really big ones and attempt to clear them up…

Misrepresentation Number 1) The Big Bang was an explosion

This seems to be a really big one. I’ve been told that I contradict myself because I point out that the Big Bang wasn’t an explosion so I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about. The term “Big Bang” was originally given to the theory (originally called “primeval atom”) by Fred Hoyle on a radio program in which he was mocking the theory. However, the misnomer stuck and has been causing confusion ever since…

The frequent picture people seem to have is matter flying outwards from a single point (like an explosion). However, the matter is all actually standing still while space itself expands dragging the matter with it.

The general analogy for this is having a series of paperclips on a rubber band. As the rubber band is stretched, the paperclips appear to move away from one another even though they are in fact holding still with regard to the rubber band. Similarly, galaxies hold still more or less (there are small movements due to gravitational interactions) while they are carried by the expanding universe.

So again, ***there was no “explosion” ***but instead, an expansion which is carrying all the rest of the universe away from us.

From NASA - Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe - Big Bang FAQ

Was the Big Bang an explosion?

No, the Big Bang was not an explosion. We don’t know what, exactly, happened in the earliest times, but it was not an explosion in the usual way that people picture explosions. There was not a bunch of debris that sprang out, whizzing out into the surrounding space. In fact, there was no surrounding space. There was no debris strewn outwards. Space itself has been stretching and carrying material with it.

From Evidence for the Big Bang Theory: Background Radiation, Red-Shift and Expansion

Contrary to popular belief, the Big Bang was not an explosion

One of the misconceptions about the Big Bang is that it was an explosion, like with fire and sound and, well, kind of like a bomb. It wasn’t. Instead, it was probably more like a balloon being blown up - a really tiny balloon. A balloon starts small and expands outward at roughly the same speed all around. Our universe is that balloon.

From The Original Usenet Physics FAQ Where is the centre of the universe?

The Famous Balloon Analogy: A good way to help visualise the expanding universe is to compare space with the surface of an expanding balloon. This analogy was used by Arthur Eddington… It was also used by Fred Hoyle in the 1960 edition of his popular book The Nature of the Universe. Hoyle wrote “My non-mathematical friends often tell me that they find it difficult to picture this expansion. Short of using a lot of mathematics I cannot do better than use the analogy of a balloon with a large number of dots marked on its surface. If the balloon is blown up the distances between the dots increase in the same way as the distances between the galaxies.”

So, to all those purposefully and stridently pro-ignorance, I say shove a stick of TNT up your ass and explode! :smack: