Cosmos TV Series Reboot

[officerripley]

"Rebooting Carl Sagan's seminal "Cosmos" miniseries three decades later is almost impossible — unless you happen to be renowned astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson...Tyson is hosting a new version of the TV series called "Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey," with the first episode airing in March on Fox and the National Geographic Channel."

To read the rest of the article & watch the video:  http://www.space.com/24243-cosmos-tv-series-neil-degrasse-tyson.htm...

[officerripley]

We're getting it on HD on the other channels too.

[PartTimeBrewer]

http://www.cosmosontv.com/  

Full episodes seem to be available on line here.  Does not do justice to visuals, at least on my old system.

[redhand]

Ok, ok, I've found something interesting.

On the cable tv guide, National Geographic lists the show as "science, educational, informative".

The Fox channels lists it as "science-fiction, fantasy". So there ya go.

[officerripley]

Figures...we,re doomed, i,m telling ya, we,re doomed...

[officerripley]

i hope so, wouldn,t that b nice. i guess i,ve spent too much time in this little ol bible belt to have much hope tho.

[officerripley]

Was gonna post a photo on here (think I saw it on failblog.org but now can't find it, sigh), at some religious function or other, this young woman is holding up a sign that says, "SCIENCE IS HARD, SO IT MUST BE WRONG!"  (See what I mean about doomed?)

[PartTimeBrewer]

[officerripley]

thats the one, where did u find it, ptb?

[DragaoDHJ]

Now! . . .  Just what is so hard about science? . . .  In grade school I had the most fun in science class. It got serious in college, but I still enjoyed it. :-)

[PartTimeBrewer]

http://blogs.redding.com/dcraig/archives/2013/09/science-is-hard.html

I just copy/pasted the content of the sign from your post into a Google image search. It came up as the first picture.

[PartTimeBrewer]

At risk of sounding outlandish, there is a sense in which the sign she is holding is correct.  Scientists are always searching for a concealed unity, or hidden symmetry that connects disparate phenomena.  The ultimate goal is a simple underlying truth from which all else can be derived. In this way they are trying to simplify our understanding of how things came to be the way they are, which is the real messiness. Just saying "God did it!" is avoidance of any attempt to understand. Scientists are often guided by the elusive property of elegance when they evaluate competing explanations.  Paul Dirac spoke of this as "beauty" but what is really being inferred is symmetry and simplicity.  Somebody, I think it was Steven Weinberg, once suggested that a final Theory of Everything ought to fit on a T-shirt. The sign only points out that we are not there yet.

If you view science as a method or a process, well yes it can be hard, but that is a good thing.  If you have a passion for it, you want nothing less than a challenge; if you don't, I guess I feel a bit sorry for for your limited outlook.  If you view science as a collection of facts and explanations, sometimes it is wrong, but it is self-correcting.  Perhaps the "hardness" is a measure of how far we still have to go to answer all of the questions, (if that is possible.)

[PartTimeBrewer]

By "cosmic coincidence", I ran into the following quote from Dr. Andrei Linde, a prominent physicist, just moments after I posted the above comment:

 "I always leave with this feeling of 'what if I'm tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful?'"

Dr. Linde was instrumental in developing what is known as inflation theory, an important step early in the evolution of the Universe.  Inflation successfully accounts for many of the properties of the universe today but direct conformation has been elusive.  He was responding to a report of the discovery of gravitational waves that might just turn out to be that evidence.