The New Cosmos Documentary- A SpaceTime Odyssey Episode 1

[wraggy]

The New Cosmos Documentary- A SpaceTime Odyssey Episode 1

It appears to be a remake of Carl Sagan's Cosmos
The first episode contains the story of Giordano Bruno. The story of Bruno is in cartoon form.

It is narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

link

[merkavah12]

[wraggy]

Mar 10, 2014 23:24:21 GMT merkavah12 said:

Thony Christe:

I was already on record as expressing scepticism about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s forthcoming Cosmos television series, as I view his knowledge of the history of science as at least as bad if not worse than Carl Sagan’s was and that was pretty terrible. Yesterday evening my Twitter stream was full of people wondering what I would have thought of N dG T’s elevation of Giordano Bruno to the status of a great scientific thinker. Fortunately I can’t view Cosmos here in Germany and so I was spared this particular piece of history of science inanity. However I came across another wonderful example of N dG T’s fantasy version of the history of science today.

thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/where-does-the-adbc-dating-convention-come-from/

I have posted a link to the first episode on YOUTUBE so that he can view it.

(EDIT) I see that it has just been blocked by Fox and/or National Geographic.

Tyson did state on this video that Bruno was not a scientist and his speculations about the Cosmos "was only guessing". You have to get to the 16 minute mark to view the story of Bruno. It is animated and reminds me of "Moses Prince of Egypt" just in the animation only.

[timoneill]

Mar 11, 2014 1:37:33 GMT wraggy said:

Mar 10, 2014 23:24:21 GMT merkavah12 said:

Thony Christe:

I was already on record as expressing scepticism about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s forthcoming Cosmos television series, as I view his knowledge of the history of science as at least as bad if not worse than Carl Sagan’s was and that was pretty terrible. Yesterday evening my Twitter stream was full of people wondering what I would have thought of N dG T’s elevation of Giordano Bruno to the status of a great scientific thinker. Fortunately I can’t view Cosmos here in Germany and so I was spared this particular piece of history of science inanity. However I came across another wonderful example of N dG T’s fantasy version of the history of science today.

thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/where-does-the-adbc-dating-convention-come-from/

I have posted a link to the first episode on YOUTUBE so that he can view it.

(EDIT) I see that it has just been blocked by Fox and/or National Geographic.

Tyson did state on this video that Bruno was not a scientist and his speculations about the Cosmos "was only guessing". You have to get to the 16 minute mark to view the story of Bruno. It is animated and reminds me of "Moses Prince of Egypt" just in the animation only.

I often refer to the Conflict Thesis clichés about Hypatia, Bruno and Galileo as "the cartoon version of science history", though here it really is a cartoon. Thony approached me last week about doing a guest post on Renaissance Mathematicus, so I e-mailed him tonight offering to write one on Bruno and his depiction in the new Cosmos. In the meantime I've been encouraged by a few online articles criticising the way the show used the Bruno story, though the comments on them contain the usual Gnu garbage.

[wraggy]

Thony Christie obviously is not too impressed by the use of Bruno in Cosmos.

simplicio

“Yesterday evening my Twitter stream was full of people wondering what I would have thought of N dG T’s elevation of Giordano Bruno to the status of a great scientific thinker.”

The show made it pretty clear Bruno’s issues with the Church were largely theological, and that while he saw support for his views in Copernicus, his beliefs came from his own philosophical and religious musings and visions. I’m pretty sure they say he was an original thinker, not a scientific one. So I don’t think there’s too much reason to get angry about it.

thonyc

So what the fork was it doing as the centrepiece of a documentary film about science?

link

[timoneill]

My article on the Bruno cartoon is now up on The Renaissance Mathematicus and Armarium Magnum.

[wraggy]

Mar 17, 2014 19:49:43 GMT timoneill said:

My article on the Bruno cartoon is now up on The Renaissance Mathematicus and Armarium Magnum.

Well done. It has generated some 20+ responses at the moment.

I like Jim Harrison's quote:

Besides the question of whether the plurality of inhabited worlds violates orthodox Christianity is the question of whether a plurality of significant world views outrages a certain contemporary view of scientific rationality.

Josh Rosenau of the NCSE has an article that details several people who objected to the use of Bruno the Cosmos episode.

ncse.com/blog/2014/03/why-did-cosmos-focus-giordano-bruno-0015457

[bjorn]

Mar 17, 2014 19:49:43 GMT timoneill said:

My article on the Bruno cartoon is now up on The Renaissance Mathematicus and Armarium Magnum.

Very good!

In a not too wise move, me thinketh, DeGrasse Tyson told the Norwegian web paper Nettavisen a few days ago that if not for religion, we would be 1000 years more developed. This is not just mentioned in passing, he is quoted on it six times, as well as in the headline and ingress.

Any attempt on damage control from the Tyson or Soter or others involved on the Bruno issue, is hard after statements like this.

Where do you believe science would be if there had been no religion?

- Without religion, we had been 1000 years more developed, he says decisively.

This is obviously an important part of his belief system.

Without doubt?

-1000 years, indeed. Or, I can guarantee 500 years, but I am not wrong if I say 1000 years, he adds and smiles broadly.

After this interview there is at least no doubt the new Cosmos series in no way will correct Sagan's warfare misconceptions.

[bjorn]

While stuff like this on a medieval multiverse would have made the new series really illuminating - and on topic.

Earlier this year we submitted an unusual paper to a scientific journal. What is unusual about it is not the topic — computations of how interactions between light and matter in the primordial Universe affected large-scale cosmic structures — but what inspired it. The paper draws on ideas in a medieval manuscript by the thirteenth-century English scholar Robert Grosseteste.

De Luce (On Light), written in 1225 in Latin and dense with mathematical thinking, explores the nature of matter and the cosmos. Four centuries before Isaac Newton proposed gravity and seven centuries before the Big Bang theory, Grosseteste describes the birth of the Universe in an explosion and the crystallization of matter to form stars and planets in a set of nested spheres around Earth.

To our knowledge, De Luce is the first attempt to describe the heavens and Earth using a single set of physical laws. Implying, probably unrealized by its author, a family of ordered universes in an ocean of disordered ones, the physics resembles the modern 'multiverse' concept.

[fortigurn]

To our knowledge, De Luce is the first attempt to describe the heavens and Earth using a single set of physical laws.

Grosseteste borrowed this idea from John Philoponus, a Christian grammarian of the 6th century in Alexandria. He was over 1,000 years ahead of everyone else. His writings were copied and used by the Arab, Muslim, and Jewish natural philosophers, such as al-Ghaza ̄lı, Saadia, and Maimonides. He was also used by Galileo and Newton.

[bjorn]

Mar 19, 2014 11:55:21 GMT fortigurn said:

Grosseteste borrowed this idea from John Philoponus

Obviously, I once even made a case for Philoponus as proof of time travel

I read this with emphasis on specific laws, though (and not on the general principle), somethings facilitating calculations or extrapolations, like the article does.

Anyhow, Philoponus is another one of those Cosmos has left in the dark. Even if they otherwise seem to enjoy talking about dark matter.