Cosmos with Neil DeGrass Tyson

I've seen this show billed as a re-make of Carl Sagan's series. Can anyone confirm that?

I just finished watching ten minutes ago and I enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed the tale of Giordano Bruno. I've always thought of Bruno as more of a strange dude than a scientist and I think that was well depicted. Looking forward to the next episode.

I get the nasaly part, but the condescending undertone? I don't get that at all.

Condescension is sometimes an appropriate tone and I've seen NDT in situations where he expresses his lack of patience with nonsense.

On the other hand, Cosmos would be an inappropriate place for such an attitude, and I personally did not detect anything like that in his voice. I think that means that I have no idea what Taq is talking about.

The story of Bruno does not admit that it was more his pantheistic views that earned him the ire of the Catholic Church and the Inquisition. While this is a fact, the Catholic Church ensured to include his belief in other worlds in his sentence of guilt, so it seems they were not oblivious to this fact and wanted to include it within his death sentence.

I'm not sure what to make of this complaint because Bruno's pantheistic views don't justify 8 years of imprisonment and turning Giordano over for burning either. And we also know from Galileo's later indictment that claims that the RCC was tolerant of Copernicus's views aren't defensible either.

It was all based upon thoughts and ideas why he was executed, so it still serves the purpose of showing how the religious institutions used ideas to have individuals put to death

I think the spirit of that principle was covered. Dr. Tyson talked about the thought police, and the fact that Bruno was no scientist.

As far as criticism, I have been a NDT fan ever since I saw his spots on 'The Universe' a show that I consider to be a History Channel highlight. But I did find the Dr Tyson's presentation to be a bit stilted, or at least, something less than seamless in a lot of the spots. Those stilted spots don't include the places where he talks about Dr. Sagan.

And if we are picking nits, I didn't like the ship design all that much either.

Big Bang, Jupiter's red spot, Earth and moon's formation, the story of Giordano Bruno

I caught the moon issue and I understand what your objection to Bruno is although I don't share it. I'm not even sure that the impact-theory for forming the moon is the only accepted possibility.

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/.../lect/moon/moon_formation.html

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Five serious theories have been proposed for the formation of the Moon (not counting the one involving green cheese):

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But what was the Jupiter Red Spot error? What was the BBT error. NDT has no business making those.

But now that you mention it, I thought the attempt to show Jupiter's surface was bad because most likely there isn't anything firm you could stand on.

I liked the Bruno story, but the primitive animation was painful. Reminded me of bad Japanese cartoons.

After I posted I realized you were talking about the animation technique more than the events. I do wish it had been better. This is one place where it is possible to out-do Sagan's series. Probably a time and money issue.

There is a lot of heat on the webs about the scientific accuracy of the show, with some of the critics being somewhat off target. But the story of Bruno seems to draw the most attention. I've even read posts defending the treatment of Bruno because he was a troublemaker and not a scientist.

The problem with the Great Red Spot animation... The problem with the Big Bang animation was equally bad because it reinforced the myth that it was some kind of explosion.

I didn't have any personal problem with the speed up because I know that without it there would be nothing much to see. I don't think I've ever seen a red spot video that was not sped up. I filled in the slowdown narrative mentally. I suspect you are right about it misleading lots of people.

I think the BB explosion problem is unavoidable without adding even more distortion just for the purpose of making a point. Viewed from an extra-dimensional perspective, wouldn't expanding from atom size in a billion-zillionth of a second look like an explosion? Some artificial slowdown would have been required... In fact I'd argue that the animation was slowed down.

I'm not asking people to agree with me.

I can easily see the stuff bothering you being an issue. I would have liked to see the Bruno stuff done with live actors with a little CGI for the space exploring parts. But the fact that they told the Bruno story at all is a plus for me.

Are you planning to watch the next one?

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Edited by NoNukes, : add some prepositions: I am going to start using preview.

The first episode was an overview, maybe it gets more informative and accurate and less "Oh, wow, the universe!" in later episodes.

I'm sticking with it for now. I don't think my standards for watching are all that high, and as far as timing goes, I just watch it on the internet at my convenience. I'm a sucker for 'physics TV'.

As for the original, I watched it on video decades after it came out. Unless I'm mistaken, you can watch it all 13 episodes here.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/cosmos/

I'm mainly interested in something well explained so that I can improve my own explanations.

I can dig it.

I am beginning to think that I could record it, edit out all of the commercials, and then replace the sound track with Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". I think I could really enjoy that.

Episode 9 of the original series include a portion of Pink Floyd's cut 'One of These Days', so what you suggest is not unprecedented.

Well I tried watching episode 1 with my 10 year old and 8 year old girls. Both immediately wanted to bail.

By all means, don't torture them with the show and maybe the will come around eventually. Both of my kids were in their teens before I could interest them in astronomy and the interest stuck only with one of the two. I call that a success.

Glad to see there were no spoilers here. I'm going to watch the show in a few minutes.

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Richards' Twitter missive linked to a Discovery Institute

In the US 'Institute' seems to mean ' bunch of agenda drive idiots' lying through their teeth.

Just when are going to see that ID based research that was promised before the Dover trial.

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On eye evolution, the #Cosmos editors again failed to do a Google Search

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Right, because all serious science is done on web sites like DI's not in Journals. #%!@* dumbass.

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Titan seemed a bit of a non-sequitur.

I think the possibility of life on Titan is a personal favorite topic of Titans. I guess we've got to get the ship off earth every show.

For example, Tyson conflates fact and theory. It would have been a perfect opportunity to describe how theories differ from facts, but instead he gave the impression that theories become facts. Unfortunate.

I spent some time thinking Tyson's words, and I'm going to have to disagree with you on this point. Tyson stuck to the party line on the relationship between guess work, theories and facts.

Tyson emphasized in particular, the distinction between guesswork, which is what people mean the criticize evolution as 'being just a theory' and real scientific theory. Whether or not you think he crossed the line when he talked about biological evolution as fact depends quite a bit on how you define theory and fact, and exactly what things about evolution you are talking about.

From the wikipedia article on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_fact_and_theory

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Biologists consider it to be a scientific fact that evolution has occurred in that modern organisms differ from past forms, and evolution is still occurring with discernible differences between organisms and their descendants. There is such strong quantitative support for the second that scientists regard common descent as being as factual as the understanding that in the Solar System the Earth orbits the Sun, but the examination of relationships is still in progress and there are possible alternatives to universal common descent.

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And just so we don't depend totally on wikipedia:

http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/lenski.html

Richard Lenski:

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Article highlights
Evolution is both fact and theory, explaining:
the major patterns of change in nature
how these changes occur
fossil and genetic evidence of change

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http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html

Quoting Stephen J. Gould

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Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.

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I note that looking this stuff up requires wading through tons of Discovery Institute and creationist postings.

I thought the comparison of the theory of evolution to the theory of gravitation was very apt.

I also give the episode an 8 out of 10 which includes a 0.5 point reduction for not having enough physics. I gave episode one an 8.5.

I think there will be a price to pay for the no holds bared position on evolution and the origin of the universe. It was not all that long ago that fear of a public backlash prevented any US distributor from taking on the Charles Darwin movie.

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Movieguide.org, an influential site which reviews films from a Christian perspective, described Darwin as the father of eugenics and denounced him as "a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder". His "half-baked theory" directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering", the site stated.

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But I'm not worried about the Discovery Institute guys. They are clowns. But I imagine there will be increasing pressure on Fox to do something about this show if Tyson continues to tell the truth without hedging.

Kepler also produced some very useful and elegant mathematical explanations right on the heels of Copernicus' work.

I would hope Kepler would at least be mentioned if the topic is about the motion of the planets. But in general Isaac Newton, at least during his sane, productive periods, was a league apart from Kepler and almost everyone else. I could imagine an entire show on Newton's contributions during which Kepler is not even mentioned.

The Astronomer Johannes Kepler had demonstrated some eighty years before that the orbits of the planets around the sun were not perfect circles, but actually ellipses. That the closer a planet was to the Sun, the faster it moved. Why?"

Thanks. Newton or no Newton, I've just given the episode a 10.1 out of 10, sight unseen. I may have to raise that between now and airtime.

In fact, now that I watched the preview again, it does not get into telling you anything about Newton, but rather what would eventually lead to his creation of calculus.

Let's see if Leibniz gets any credit.

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Edited by Admin, : Fix quote.