Posted on 01/13/2014 10:37:29 AM PST by 12th_Monkey
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.
For those who may have missed the original back in 1980, "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage" was a documentary series on PBS that explored the universe as well as the history of scientific discovery. Sagan's topics of discussion ranged from Japanese folklore to debunking astrology to the ultimate fate of the stars and galaxies that surround us.
Now 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
I re-watched it the other day and cringed at the leftist stuff I was too young to notice before..
The fact that he bears a passing resemblance to our POS Attorney General (and Oprah’s beard) doesn’t help matters either.
My cringe muscles are in good shape, so I’m up for it.
Over on Business Insider, I site I otherwise enjoy; they incessantly prop this guy. So much so, that I will never watch him.
Pleased to meet you,
Hope you guessed my name.
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Seriously, it’s a huge time commitment to watch all 10 sessions of this conference, but it is very insightful.
Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-science-religion-reason-and-survival
Sagan was a pot head.
Why would anyone trust anything he proposed is beyond me.
Tyson is arrogant, but, he knows his stuff. He also seems to be sober. I’ll take that.
Dr Sagan often took a shine to certain lab classes and would frequently meet with the 8-10 students of these labs at the local pub, The Palms. He could literally speak for hours and hours about everything space and time worthy. His accounting of ancient cultures and their incorporation of astronomy observation into their cultures was first rate. He’d go on for days about Babylonian culture and, as a pretty well read “secular” Jew (he grew up Orthodox in Brooklyn), knew how the Babyonian Captivity transformed the Hebrew religion is fundamental ways. He was mesmerizing in person, a lot less irritating than the man one observes on the boob toob.
ˈblōˌhärd/
I could see him now, like Professor Jennings in Animal House:
That's one hell of a bar tab.
I’m looking forward with trepidation. I enjoy the Universe series, but the production values are skimpy, and the presentation is somewhat overly dramatic for my tastes.
I have reservations about Neil de Grasse Tyson for a lot of reasons, mainly intellectual depth, and his willingness to make gratuitous and ill-framed comments about things outside his expertise, like religion, for instance. If you could get him to just stick to basic astronomy he’s not a bad presenter. Unfortunately, he is also much more opinionated than knowledgeable about the history of astronomy.
I personally found Sagan off-putting and didn’t appreciate the original Cosmos. I worked with a guy who took his PhD in physics at Cornell a couple of years after Sagan, and was a graduate student when Sagan was finishing his graduate studies. He had a few Sagan anecdotes. His first impression of Sagan was at a colloquium, where Sagan was the only graduate student who spoke right up, along side the professors and post-docs. After getting his PhD, my colleague worked at Arecibo, which was managed by Cornell. Sagan used to come down during winter break to play volleyball and have a few rum and coke-cola with the co-ed grad students, not interferring much with the administration and work of the actual facility. Sagan was the perfect TV scientist.
Knew a guy who was a classmate, a few years behind Sagan. After his PhD, this guy worked at Aricebo, where Sagan would come down in the winter for volleyball and run and coke-cola with the coeds.
To be clear, the discussion would end one evening and he would pick it right up where he stopped the following evening, which could be convened as much as a week later. Further, I do not recall him ever picking up the bar tab, large or small.
Because Neil cannot get his mug in front of a camera enough?
There’re billions and billions of young............
This could be cool if Tyson doesn’t go off on too many AGW rants (Sagan ranted about nuclear winter). The music for the original show can’t be beat but a whole lot of changes have come about since the first Cosmos.
Though he's a Brit, Prof. Brian Cox (from the BBC series "Wonders of the Solar System") should be doing this.
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