This week's episode had two focuses, the first being to teach those of us with a penis that women have brains. Seriously, the point couldn't have been hammered into us any more directly unless the words "women have brains" had been written on a brick which was then smashed into the collective skull of man.
The second point concerned the fate of the stars, including our own sun, which will one day lose its proverbial spark. On this point, Tyson casually expressed his hope that mankind will have found a new home before that happens, then he moved on to other things. And that pissed me off. The biggest difference between the Sagan and Tyson versions of this series is not the science itself, but the tone in which it is presented. The 2014 Cosmos is, frankly, an angrier Cosmos. And the points made, right or wrong, are made with caveman-like oversimplicity. Religion bad. Woman good. Corporations bad. Here, in the 8th installment, the show had a chance to insert a powerful justification for the importance of space travel, but instead the focus was on the animation of exploding stars. Assuming the series exists to try make the wonder of the universe something for people to aspire to again, it was a waste for them not to include an impassioned (oversimplistic) plea for manned space exploration. I've started my annual rewatching of Babylon 5 recently, and happened upon an episode that succinctly sums up what Cosmos failed to mention. The words of JMS spoken by the late Michael O'Hare: http://youtu.be/TA2LjpfTcdg As for the wine scene in this week's Cosmos... if you're going to wax philosophical (or astrophysical) about a sip of wine, you have to do better than Feynman. To wit: “A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!” -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
