COSMOS on Fox, et al

[MillCreek]

Did anyone see the COSMOS reboot last night?  What did you think?  I remember watching the original when I was much younger, and the first episode of the reboot did not thrill me. 

[Ben]

I was gonna check it out, but then forgot to set the DVR. I'll have to catch a rebroadcast. I watched the original when it first came out as well. I am disappointed to hear the reboot may not be up to par.

[Sindawe]

Watched it last night, was not impressed.  The opening credits went on for FAR too long with bland opening music.  The visuals were nicely done, but the presentation of the information felt like fluff.  No new (to me) concepts were introduced.  Maybe thats just the years of learning talking...

I'll likely make a point of watching it though.  I'm starved for science based TV entertainment.  Nova and Nature keep jumping around in the PBS schedules and the old standbys of Discovery channel, History channel & Animal Planet have been over run by hords of Ice Truck Ax Road Duck Pickers.

[fifth_column]

Put me in the "not overly impressed camp" as well.  I thought there were way too many scenes with the narrator in them. 

I learned something about Bruno I didn't know before.  Namely that he existed. 

It had a bit of a propaganda feel to it, IMO.  Almost felt like they were trying to defend science and the scientific method to a certain extent. 

The subtle homage to Sagan was nice.

[Ron]

I'm actually looking forward to watching it myself.

While I'm sure I'll learn some stuff as well as enjoy the show; my expectation is that it will be a thinly veiled apologetic for the cult of scientism.

[geronimotwo]

i agree the first episode seemed very vague.  i did like the bruno emphasis.  it made me wonder what books have been burned, in the name of the church, that may have had an earlier impact on scientific discovery.

[TommyGunn]

DVD'd it last night.
I checked it out awhile ago, atleast the 1st five minutes.
What's the first thing I saw??
OBAMA!    
That soured me a bit.
I saw some nice special effects.


I have the original series taped off TV on VHS and the series is also available on commercial DVD. 
They changed some of the effects to modernize them for the DVD release.
PLUS it uses a lot of classical music.
I think I will wind up liking the original better ........
AND IT DOESN'T HAVE  OBAMA IN IT!!!!

[fifth_column]

I'm actually looking forward to watching it myself.

While I'm sure I'll learn some stuff as well as enjoy the show; my expectation is that it will be a thinly veiled apologetic for the cult of scientism.

Saw that coming . . .  [/Jayne]

[bedlamite]

Available on youtube now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_tEBHsbDHE

[AJ Dual]

Put me in the "not overly impressed camp" as well.  I thought there were way too many scenes with the narrator in them. 

I learned something about Bruno I didn't know before.  Namely that he existed. 

It had a bit of a propaganda feel to it, IMO.  Almost felt like they were trying to defend science and the scientific method to a certain extent. 

The subtle homage to Sagan was nice.

You don't remember the original one well then. It was heavy on evolution, used Venus as a foil for MMGW and the greenhouse effect, and tied in the KT impactor to nuclear winter and a heavy undercurrent of "ZOMG Reagan is going to kill us all!"

They went to Bruno because they didn't want to re-hash Kepler ,Tycho Brahe, and Galileo.

And because the Kepler telescope, and the earlier gravitational wiggle technique in the early 90's has confirmed several hundred planets since the original series aired, making billions of planets a statistical certainty we didn't have in the 80's.

I think that part of the problem with the Cosmos reboot is that the thunder has since been stolen a million times since by CGI- heavy space and tech shows on cable and PBS.

It's a tough tightrope to walk, agreeing the universe is 12x10^9 years old, and with evolution, and that young earth creationists and ID'ers, are FOS, but still disliking how the secular left uses it to constantly demonize, antagonize, and provoke them at the same time...

[geronimotwo]

Available on youtube now:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_tEBHsbDHE

already removed due to copyright.

[MillCreek]

Sagan really was the voice of Nuclear Winter.  I got to meet him once at Fred Hutch when he was here in Seattle for one of his bone marrow transplants.

[roo_ster]

Put me in the "not overly impressed camp" as well.  I thought there were way too many scenes with the narrator in them. 

I learned something about Bruno I didn't know before.  Namely that he existed. 

It had a bit of a propaganda feel to it, IMO.  Almost felt like they were trying to defend science and the scientific method to a certain extent. 

The subtle homage to Sagan was nice.

Here's a clue: Bruno was not done in for any science he did.  Matter of fact, he was not a scientist.  He was more of a New Age goofball.  In addition to his many theological heresies against RC orthodoxy (denied many of the bedrock lower-case-O orthodox beliefs such as the divinity of Christ) he was some sort of weirdo memory-hypnotist charlatan.  IIRC, it was one of his marks that got the Inquisitorial ball rolling after he realized he was taken.

So, not a martyr of science.  And a very odd choice for canonization by the church of science.

[Regolith]

Watched it last night, was not impressed.  The opening credits went on for FAR too long with bland opening music.  The visuals were nicely done, but the presentation of the information felt like fluff.  No new (to me) concepts were introduced.  Maybe thats just the years of learning talking...

That was my impression as well.

I don't think it will get any less "fluffy", though. I've noticed a trend in documentaries moving more and more towards special effects and visuals being prioritized over information, and this seems like it's bought into that style-over-substance approach. 

[Ryan in Maine]

I enjoyed it, but it was a little underwhelming. I'm hoping that first episode was just to introduce a few ideas to help ease the viewers into what's to come.

[Ron]

Here's a clue: Bruno was not done in for any science he did.  Matter of fact, he was not a scientist.  He was more of a New Age goofball.  In addition to his many theological heresies against RC orthodoxy (denied many of the bedrock lower-case-O orthodox beliefs such as the divinity of Christ) he was some sort of weirdo memory-hypnotist charlatan.  IIRC, it was one of his marks that got the Inquisitorial ball rolling after he realized he was taken.

So, not a martyr of science.  And a very odd choice for canonization by the church of science.

If they get the documented history wrong, how trustworthy is the "science" that is being presented? Starts looking like an agenda driven show right out of the box.

http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/cosmos_spacetime_odyssey_review-131240

It starts out well. Tyson tells us we are going to explore the very large and the very small and then he flies us through space, a lot like he does in his brilliant Hayden Planetarium show. We get rogue planets, distant suns and 100,000 light years of context in just a few minutes.

Then suddenly we get a claim that Giordano Bruno is responsible for the concept of the universe - because he read 'banned' books. Lucretious wasn't science - there was no scientific evidence for his claim that wind caused earthquakes or worms spontaneously generated - it was philosophy, and his book was not rare in 1600 AD, people were also not martyred for reading it, and yet we get told a philosophical belief in infinity was what got Bruno into trouble.

It's an immediate disconnect for people who know science history because it smacks of an agenda. I instead object because it is flat-out incorrect. To claim that Bruno promoted the concept of the universe, a "soaring vision", despite persecution, while simultaneously being hired over and over by the institutions we are told were oppressing him, makes no sense. That segment of the show makes it sound like he was a devout Christian tormented by reason rather than what he was - a cultist who engaged in confirmation bias to pick and choose anything that matched his beliefs.(1)

Bruno's "science" was never mentioned during his trial, he was on trial for being a cult worshiper. He only took up the cause of Copernicus because he believed in the Egyptian god Thoth and Hermetism and their belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun, not because he had perceived anything radical. Galileo rightly dismissed most of Bruno's teachings as philosophical mumbo-jumbo. Bruno was only revived as a 'scientist' and a martyr for science by anti-religious humanists in the 19th century.The church didn't even bother to ban his writing until well after he was dead.

 

[Ron]

Another critique.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/13/five-things-neil-degrasse-tysons-cosmos-gets-wrong/

[Perd Hapley]

Another critique.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/13/five-things-neil-degrasse-tysons-cosmos-gets-wrong/

I'm trying to figure out point #5. Is the author saying that materialists object to the idea of six days of creation, even if it is taken as a "completely arbitrary metric," and not believed as literal truth? 

Cause otherwise, I can't see how anyone's being hypocritical on that specific point.

[Ron]

5. The Universe Was Also Not Created In One Year

On January 1st, we had the Big Bang and on December 31st, I am alive, less than a tiny fraction of a millisecond before midnight. That can’t be right — it took me a whole day just to write this article.

Oh, Cosmos is not being literal? Oddly, a number of religious critics, Tyson included, insist that too many religious people believe the Book of Genesis is taken literally by people who read the Bible. Unless we accept that figurative comparisons help make large ideas manageable, a year is no more accurate than six days — it is instead a completely arbitrary metric invented to show some context for how things evolved.

It seems odd to be critical when religion does it and then invent a new timescale for how the universe came to be. It’s almost like we are to believe that short timescales are opiates for the masses.

It appears the columnist is assuming the position that the six days of creation are a literary device to "help make large ideas manageable". He then pointed out how the same tact (figurative comparisons) was used in the Cosmos show to present their ideas on cosmology.

The columnist seems to dismiss six day creationists as a small subgroup of the larger body of Christians. 

[fifth_column]

Another critique.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/13/five-things-neil-degrasse-tysons-cosmos-gets-wrong/

I don't have time to write about all the points made in this article.  I'd say the author has a definite agenda, as obvious as the one put forth on the show.  In the very first point the author states "Even the most aggressive climate change models and their 20-foot ocean rises don’t predict that for Earth, no matter how many Chevy Volts we don’t buy."  Nowhere does anyone say that the earth is in danger of becoming anything remotely like Venus.  Saying the atmosphere on Venus is a greenhouse atmosphere has nothing to do with the atmosphere on Earth.

Carry on.

[Ron]

I don't have time to write about all the points made in this article.  I'd say the author has a definite agenda, as obvious as the one put forth on the show.  In the very first point the author states "Even the most aggressive climate change models and their 20-foot ocean rises don’t predict that for Earth, no matter how many Chevy Volts we don’t buy."  Nowhere does anyone say that the earth is in danger of becoming anything remotely like Venus.  Saying the atmosphere on Venus is a greenhouse atmosphere has nothing to do with the atmosphere on Earth.

Carry on.

http://www.greendiary.com/earth-might-end-up-like-venus-steven-hawking.html

‘Earth might end up like Venus! Temperatures here may rise to 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid!’ It is said by one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, and cannot be ignored. Steven Hawking warned this in a recent talk in China, stating that he is ‘very worried about global warming.”

The author of ‘A Brief History of Time’ said he was afraid that Earth “might end up like Venus, at 250 degrees centigrade and raining sulfuric acid.” Though nerve wrecking a prediction, we can actually prove him wrong by stopping global warming. Can’t we actually stop it?!

Carry on.

[fifth_column]

Apparently this is from 2006.  And an extremely obscure reference at that.  I still find the Federalist article disingenuous.

[roo_ster]

Apparently this is from 2006.  And an extremely obscure reference at that.  I still find the Federalist article disingenuous.

Hawking is obscure like Shakespeare is obscure.

(Most everyone knows who he is and why he is famous, but few voluntarily bother to read him.)

[Perd Hapley]

It appears the columnist is assuming the position that the six days of creation are a literary device to "help make large ideas manageable". He then pointed out how the same tact (figurative comparisons) was used in the Cosmos show to present their ideas on cosmology.

The columnist seems to dismiss six day creationists as a small subgroup of the larger body of Christians. 

The thing is, he assumes  that Tyson, et al, don't object only to a literal six days, but even a figurative six days. And that seems like a weird claim to make.

[AJ Dual]

Hell, even Kahn couldn't catch on when Spock said "Hours would seem like days" when they were trying to get the Enterprise's auxiliary power back online.