Cosmos is back!

[didymus]

Any else old enough to remember the series Cosmos with Carl Sagan?
Now Fox is doing a remake with Niel deGrasse Tyson; Cosmos - a Spacetime Odyssey.

The original series came out in 1980 & is available for free on Hulu.

 

[Cat]

Would you believe when I saw this thread, my first thought was, “You mean Cosmos–and Damian?!”

Sorry.

It’s a different spelling anyway: Cosmas.

 

[Bobby_Jim]

I loved Cosmos! I was maybe 6 years old when it was first broadcast on PBS. I was so into space then. Loved it! Thanks for the Hulu link. I like Neil deGrasse Tyson as well. Should be a good show.

 

[pyro_alchemist]

-]/-]I often pray for the repose of Carl Sagin’s soul. Even though he was amore professed atheist if you read his novel “Contact” (the book-not the movie) you can see that in his heart he was more open to the spiritual than in his public confession.

 

[didymus]

I often pray for the repose of Carl Sagin’s soul. Even though he was amore professed atheist if you read his novel “Contact” (the book-not the movie) you can see that in his heart he was more open to the spiritual than in his public confession.

I was thinking about that. Tyson is an atheist as well and while I wouldn’t call him strident, he’s definitely more hard line than Sagan or the late Stephen Jay Gould.

 

[empther]

if you read his novel “Contact” (the book-not the movie) you can see that in his heart he was more open to the spiritual than in his public confession.

In the book, the girl asked the alien for some proof of God. He told her to calculate the value of Pi way out to a lot of decimal points.
She did and found a sequence about a billion decimal points down the road that was all zeroes and ones. When these were graphed out they formed a perfect circle. Pi is used to calculate the circumference of a circle. The message was God had rigged the value of Pi to do this.

Well of course this is impossible. God can’t rig the value of Pi. It is what it is. I was surprised that Sagan made this sophomoric mistake.

As for the tv series, I loved it until the last episode. Then, Sagan was supposedly returning to Earth after a long trip through the universe, and found out the world was silent because there had been a nuclear war.

Sagan was obsessed with the possibility of nublear war. He went on all the talk shows he could to talk about “nuclear winter”, the drop in world temperatures after a nuclear war because the dust thrown up into the atmosphere would block out sunlight.

Hear anything about nuclear winter recently? Edward Teller, the atomic physicist and “father of the hydrogen bomb”, said the dust would be washed out of the atmosphere by rain in a few weeks. No nuclear winter!

 

[manygift1spirit]

This should be interesting, albeit I expect a mixed bag.

Dr. Tyson is an absolutely fantastic ambassador for science, I would say better than Sagan was. But he is also unapologetically scientistic, which would be concerning.

Sagan took considerable truth value liberties with his treatment of Galileo, the Alexandrean library etc, and I worry Tyson will do similarly. While he has been better the last six months or so, for a while his Twitter feed was full of snarky disdain for people of faith, and faith itself. The one trailer I saw had a brief glimpse of a man being burned at the stake by another man in a mitre. I cannot say this never happened, but I suspect it’s prominence in the series will be a reflection of some anti-Christian trope.

 

[Bobby_Jim]

Hear anything about nuclear winter recently? Edward Teller, the atomic physicist and “father of the hydrogen bomb”, said the dust would be washed out of the atmosphere by rain in a few weeks. No nuclear winter!

I don’t know how much has been on this lately, but I doubt it’s settled, because people are in general less concerned about nuclear war. I wouldn’t necessarily trust either Sagan or Teller on the subject of climate; Teller was a nuclear physicist and I think Sagan was an astrophysicist, so climate is not really an area of expertise for either. I will say that when you have big volcanic eruptions the dust hangs around for a while, doesn’t get washed out right away. Also Teller was known for being rather an apologist for nuclear weapons. I think the character of Dr Strangelove was based on Teller. Teller was a big proponent of nuclear weapons in space as well, to power X-ray lasers.

 

[empther]

I wouldn’t necessarily trust either Sagan or Teller on the subject of climate; Teller was a nuclear physicist and I think Sagan was an astrophysicist, so climate is not really an area of expertise for either.

Advanced physicists in the order of Teller are really highly skilled mathematicians. When you get into the advanced areas of physics, it’s all mathematics.

The climate situation in question was simple. How long before every particle of dust is hit by a raindrop? For a guy like Teller, this problem is child’s play. Hell, I could probably do it myself!

 

[tomarin]

I have fond memories of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” “we are all starstuff”, “primordial soup,” etc. etc. Even though the special effects (such as they were) were extremely primitive by today’s standards, I doubt that the new version will evoke the same sense of wonder. Also, I’m not twelve anymore.

 

[SurlyMermaid]

Sooo excited about this! Had no idea the original was on Hulu.

I will check this out. Thanks for the tip!

 

[Bobby_Jim]

Advanced physicists in the order of Teller are really highly skilled mathematicians. When you get into the advanced areas of physics, it’s all mathematics.

The climate situation in question was simple. How long before every particle of dust is hit by a raindrop? For a guy like Teller, this problem is child’s play. Hell, I could probably do it myself!

The X-ray laser never worked as Teller envisioned. They tried experiments during underground nuclear tests. He was a brilliant guy but he wasn’t right about everything.

More generally - it is not the case that physics is all mathematics. One gets very quickly into mathematically intractable problems. One of the real skills is in knowing what simplifying assumptions to make to make the mathematics tractable, and also having the correct physical insights to know which model to apply in what situation, and this is where physicists of one specialty will quickly get out of their league applying their mathematical skills to another area.

I can’t find the quote, but upon the publication or discovery of the Schroedinger equation of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, it was suggested (I forget if it was Schroedinger himself, or Dirac, or one of these others), that all of chemistry and much of physics was now known. And of course biology is just chemistry, so all of biology is solved too. And in a sense it is true, there is now a mathematical description of the electron, which governs what we call “chemistry”. But it is a huge leap from that equation, to actually predicting anything beyond the simplest systems.

Similar with climate. One can very easily come up with something simple like you describe, how long does it take rain drops to hit all the particles. But you could be off by a factor of 100 because of many unknowns, like the size distribution of the particles which governs how they are distributed in the different atmostpheric layers (some of this may end up well above where rain drops form).

 

[empther]

I can’t find the quote, but upon the publication or discovery of the Schroedinger equation of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, it was suggested (I forget if it was Schroedinger himself, or Dirac, or one of these others), that all of chemistry and much of physics was now known. And of course biology is just chemistry, so all of biology is solved too.

Even smart guys can say stupid things.
Whoever said that must have been criticized by his associates.

Similar with climate. One can very easily come up with something simple like you describe, how long does it take rain drops to hit all the particles. But you could be off by a factor of 100 because of many unknowns, like the size distribution of the particles which governs how they are distributed in the different atmostpheric layers (some of this may end up well above where rain drops form).

1. Only dust particles barely large enough to be seen by the naked eye would stay suspended in air for long. Anything larger would fall. Microscopic particles don’t stop sunlight. Light has a way to get around microscopic particles. Otherwise we could not see galaxies billions of lightyears away. Photons have wavelengths. A little light penetrates six inches into the ground.
2. Since warm air rises and cold air falls, all air is churned over from ground to space.
3. Even the tiniest dust particle is a million times as heavy as an air molecule. It’s speed of motion is very slow compared to an air molecule and it would rarely get up to the thin high atmosphere, and then quickly fall.
4. The average world rainfall is twenty inches a year. So every year you have a global “layer of water” fall through the air. Actually, it would only take an eighth of a inch of water to sweep away 99% of the dust.
   If you have allergies, breath the air after a rainfall. It’s wonderfully clean.

 

[Joe_5859]

Would you believe when I saw this thread, my first thought was, “You mean Cosmos–and Damian?!”

Sorry.

It’s a different spelling anyway: Cosmas.

My first thought was there was a new TV spin-off show centered around Cosmo Kramer and the thread title was just a typo.

 

[DaveBj]

The Cosmos series is, as noted, on Hulu, but the much longer Universeseries is available for free streaming on Netflix.

With regard to dust in the atmosphere and “nuclear winter,” much of the climate-changing dust would be much higher than the levels at which rain is formed. Check out the “year without a summer,” 1816, caused by the eruption of Mount Tambura the previous year.

 

[tomarin]

It is rather disappointing that Carl Sagan came to the conclusions he did about God, but at least he gave some reason for the way he felt the way he did. I remember once he explained that if God had inspired the writing of the Bible, why didn’t he reveal his infinite scientific knowledge by inserting in it coded information that scientifically advanced civilizations could discover and marvel at at a later date, and which would ensure that people would not question whether the authors of the Bible were merely bronze-age shepherds with no knowledge of the way the material universe works?

I guess the response is that this is one version of “putting God under a microscope” which is the wrong way to approach God.

 

[empther]

With regard to dust in the atmosphere and “nuclear winter,” much of the climate-changing dust would be much higher than the levels at which rain is formed. Check out the “year without a summer,” 1816, caused by the eruption of Mount Tambura the previous year.

I was aware of that year.

In addition to the Tambora event:

It is now generally thought that the aberrations occurred because of the April 5–15, 1815, volcanic Mount Tambora eruption[18][19] on the island of Sumbawa, Indonesia

There were other volcanic events at the time:

Other large volcanic eruptions (with VEI at least 4) around this time were:
1812, La Soufrière on Saint Vincent in the Caribbean
1812, Awu in the Sangihe Islands, Indonesia
1813, Suwanosejima in the Ryukyu Islands, Japan
1814, Mayon in the Philippines

Volcanic eruptions give off large amounts of sulfur dioxide which combines with water to form sulfuric acid. This acid in the air reflects a lot of sunlight back out to space.

However,
you’ll notice that it was “the year ( 1816 ) without a winter”, not the decade, the effect was felt only in some parts of the world, parts that fell in the path of the dust cloud, and there was no mass extermination of people.
This is far different from Carl Sagan’s scenario which was like the end of civilization.

 

[empther]

I remember once he explained that if God had inspired the writing of the Bible, why didn’t he reveal his infinite scientific knowledge by inserting in it coded information that scientifically advanced civilizations could discover and marvel at at a later date, and which would ensure that people would not question whether the authors of the Bible were merely bronze-age shepherds with no knowledge of the way the material universe works?

Jesus refused to speak to Herod so as not to increase Herod’s sin.

God in his wisdom may find it better to leave man without scientific proof of the Divine.
Making a decision about such proof would be a crisis.

In a crisis, men go one way or the other. They either become heroes or villains.
Perhaps leaving us with a shadow of doubt keeps some of us from categorically rejecting God to his face, which some people would do.

 

[tomarin]

Jesus refused to speak to Herod so as not to increase Herod’s sin.

God in his wisdom may find it better to leave man without scientific proof of the Divine.
Making a decision about such proof would be a crisis.

In a crisis, men go one way or the other. They either become heroes or villains.
Perhaps leaving us with a shadow of doubt keeps some of us from categorically rejecting God to his face, which some people would do.

That’s certainly something to ponder. Are you saying there would be more atheists if God showed His face, or spoke to us in a clear voice?

 

[empther]

Are you saying there would be more atheists if God showed His face, or spoke to us in a clear voice?

There would be NO atheists.
There would be more people blatantly defying God. It’s a psychological thing.
Satan and his gang weren’t atheists. They were defiant.

It’s like that bum Ariel Castro who kept three girls prisoners for ten years.
At his sentencing hearing he said he wasn’t a violent man, the girls had a happy house, and the girls asked him for sex! :bigyikes: :bigyikes: :bigyikes: :bigyikes:

Don’t understand it? Neither do I, but that’s how some people are.