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 ...
He must have been drinking beer through a straw. That’s how the Babylonians did it.
My problems with Sagan stem from his vilifying critiques of Velikovsky’s works, panning them, denying everything about them, WITHOUT EVER SO MUCH AS READING THEM!!!! Sagan did not even rebut them by addressing the points made in them, many of which have been proven correct, but rather attacked Velikivsky for not being a scientist in Sagan’s field and therefore not worthy of even cursory consideration. Hi attacks were pseudo-scientific closed-mindedness of the worst kind. . . Sagan simply refused to look, to be challenged.
Of possible interest to the ping list..
NDGT...lol.
Zawi Hawass...the Pompous, tiresome, and irksome Anti-Semite of Egyptology.
Carol Fontaine, the Pompous tiresome and irksome Negator of New Testament
and NDGT, the pompous Tiresome and irksome Ass of Astrophysics.
The only one I know personally is the middle one, and she is even worse off the screen than she is on.
I liked the original show. It was peaceful to listen to.
Wasn’t that the guy who Sagan said that suggested that the planet Venus was, “Spat out,” from Jupiter?
Yup. . . and he predicted the condition on Venus that would be found there by our Probes so accurately based on that scenario, when all other astronomers were postulating planet girdling oceans and temperatures only about 40° centigrade higher than earth on average. He also predicted the make-up of the atmosphere and pressures we found there. . . also based on his postulation on Venus being born out of Jupiter within the memory of mythological time. Velikovsky presented other arguments for his theory, then made predictions based on his theory that proved far more accurate than those of the other astronomers and cosmologists such as Sagan who called him a charlatan. . . All without reading what he had to say, or looking at his evidence, because they knew better. The test of ANY theory is how well does it predict future discoveries in the field. Velikovsky'd track record is far better than Sagan's on this.
What I remember of that Cosmos episode, “Heaven and Hell,” was that Sagan criticized the fact that other scientists tried to suppress Velikovsky’s works. If memory serves, Sagan said, “The suppression of uncomfortable ideas might be popular in religion or politics. But it is not the path to knowledge, and has no place in the endeavor of science.”
Which strikes me as a bit hypocritical coming from a guy who was on the same side as the man-made global warming folks, who are engaging in the same suppression.
Sagan WROTE the primary attack on Velikovsky and admitted he had not bothered to read the works before doing so. . . He was a hypocrite. On the other hand, Albert Einstein wrote the forward to Velikovsky’s book.
Doesn’t surprise me. They are liberals, after all.
He was a leftist demagogue, so it figures he’d attack Dr V — early attackers of Velikovsky like Harlow Shapley were similarly politically affiliated. When digging into defenders of Shapley’s position during the Shapley-Curtis debate, I figure I’ll find a leftie. Shapley led the campaign to get “Worlds In Collision” suppressed and removed from publication.
Curtis’ position was fairly conservatively stated, that the spiral nebulae were actually other galaxies, which is what he held the Milky Way to be. He was wrong about the size by one order of magnitude.
Shapley’s position was that nearly the entire visible universe is what we know as the Milky Way, and using a technique he helped pioneer, gave a size estimate for the MW about three times its actual size.
Whereas both of them were right about something or other in this debate, it remains mysterious to me that anyone could not see that Curtis was much more correct, so I find it reasonable to conclude that Shapley proponents are for the most part left-wing figurative bomb throwers.
Sagan didn’t invent the bogus greenhouse for Venus (and Mars, and Earth), he merely made it more bogus. :’)
Whoops, I wrote:
> He was wrong about the size by one order of magnitude
s/b
> His size estimate differed from Shapley by one order of magnitude
And regarding the size difference, Curtis was about 1/3 actual, Shapley about 3x actual, meaning from the standpoint of ratios, it’s a wash; but Curtis was only off by 70,000 ly, while Shapley was off by 200,000 ly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW-QQSWgXi4
It’s a delight to watch and listen to that brilliant man.
Compared to the sarcastic pipsqueek Carl Sagan, who insisted, along with his peers, that Venus was only a few degrees warmer than our planet, and when it was discovered to be HOT and covered in an hydrocarbon cloud, as calculated by Velikovsky, insisted that this HEAT of 800 degrees was the result of THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MlN7iVIuhk
However, as Velikovsky says, Science is a SELF CORRECTING discipline, and that’s why the GLOBAL WARMING scam which is based upon that same fictitious ‘greenhouse effect’ is going down, with Al Gore and the UN at the helm.
Long Live Velikovsky’s WORLDS IN COLLISION!
Ancient Greek 'myth' has it that Athena (Venus) sprang from the head of Zeus (Saturn). The legend is told as a war of the gods as seen from earth by mankind.
http://ebookbrowsee.net/velikovsky-immanuel-worlds-in-collision-pdf-d396654755
download available here
Wow, just... wow....
So now you can tell me why WOW?
Because if the world had listened to him, we wouldn’t have had the scare campaign of global warming?
Did you guys hear about this?
FOX is airing the premiere on ten channels at the same time including both of their sports channels. This move is either so retarded it’s brilliant, or so brilliant it’s retarded.
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