New Cosmos series pulls no punches!


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I enjoyed Carl Sagan's Cosmos series years ago. Now an astronomer Sagan encouraged named Tyson is featured as the guide in a new version of Cosmos. The first segment was heavily advertised on TV and in the print media with full page ads in the Sunday New York Times and The Boston Globe and I am sure all across the country.

Tyson covered all the time since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago using a cosmic calendar which had human beings enter close to midnight on the last day of the cosmic year.

I was impressed by the fact that Tyson focused on the torment and tragedy of a little known independent thinker who lived in the Sixteenth Century by the name of Giordano Bruno. Bruno has been someone I found out about years ago and is one of my heroes along with Galileo. His life was featured in the latest Cosmos opening in an animation in which it was made clear he did not accept the dogma of the Catholic Church which held that the Earth was the center of the Universe around which everything revolved including the sun and the stars as well as the other planets.

As I imagine everyone on this site realizes, Bruno learned of the Copernican theory and taught it throughout Europe and England but was lured back to Venice and subjected to imprisonment and torment to recant by the Inquisition for eight years before he was finally sentenced to be burned at the stake by the State.

If ever there were a good case for separation of Church and State, this is it!

I have not yet heard if the Catholic heirarchy has watched this Cosmos but I will be surprised if they remain silent or apologetic or humble if not enraged to be held up to ridicule. Of course supposedly no one knew any better in those days except those who read the works of Lucretius from ancient times.

How utterly totalitarian of the Church to be willing to torture and kill those who didn't share their dogmatic beliefs and had the audacity to use their own judgment. As bleak as our own times can be the Dark Ages hopefully will remain in the past and not in our future. Are you listening traditional Republicans and Evangelicals, Baptists and Born Agains? Not to mention the Fundamentalists of all religions.

I am surprised no one chose to mention the Cosmos showing here.

Tyson did suggest that the origins of life on Earth are not quite clear although there is plenty of evidence that the conditions were ripe for the natural creation of RNA and DNA without recourse to extraterrestrial sources. At least Tyson does not include supernatural intervention as a possibility!

gg

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I enjoyed Carl Sagan's Cosmos series years ago. Now an astronomer Sagan encouraged named Tyson is featured as the guide in a new version of Cosmos. The first segment was heavily advertised on TV and in the print media with full page ads in the Sunday New York Times and The Boston Globe and I am sure all across the country.

Tyson covered all the time since the big bang 13.8 billion years ago using a cosmic calendar which had human beings enter close to midnight on the last day of the cosmic year.

I was impressed by the fact that Tyson focused on the torment and tragedy of a little known independent thinker who lived in the Sixteenth Century by the name of Giordano Bruno. Bruno has been someone I found out about years ago and is one of my heroes along with Galileo. His life was featured in the latest Cosmos opening in an animation in which it was made clear he did not accept the dogma of the Catholic Church which held that the Earth was the center of the Universe around which everything revolved including the sun and the stars as well as the other planets.

As I imagine everyone on this site realizes, Bruno learned of the Copernican theory and taught it throughout Europe and England but was lured back to Venice and subjected to imprisonment and torment to recant by the Inquisition for eight years before he was finally sentenced to be burned at the stake by the State.

If ever there were a good case for separation of Church and State, this is it!

I have not yet heard if the Catholic heirarchy has watched this Cosmos but I will be surprised if they remain silent or apologetic or humble if not enraged to be held up to ridicule. Of course supposedly no one knew any better in those days except those who read the works of Lucretius from ancient times.

How utterly totalitarian of the Church to be willing to torture and kill those who didn't share their dogmatic beliefs and had the audacity to use their own judgment. As bleak as our own times can be the Dark Ages hopefully will remain in the past and not in our future. Are you listening traditional Republicans and Evangelicals, Baptists and Born Agains? Not to mention the Fundamentalists of all religions.

I am surprised no one chose to mention the Cosmos showing here.

Tyson did suggest that the origins of life on Earth are not quite clear although there is plenty of evidence that the conditions were ripe for the natural creation of RNA and DNA without recourse to extraterrestrial sources. At least Tyson does not include supernatural intervention as a possibility!

gg

Tyson is a professional astro-physicist. I would expect nothing other from him.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Yeah Bruno was a martry for science. Cant objectivists come up with a new trope.

Actually Giodorno Bruno was not a scientist. He was a philosophical speculator. He had no basis for saying the things he said. Galileo, on the other hand did. He was one of the first to point a telescope up to the sky, rather than look for ships on the horizon. Galileo made his share of mistakes, but at least he worked from an empirical and a mathematical basis. Bruno did not.

Think about it a bit. Until ten or fifteen years ago (or so) we had no evidence of planets going around other stars. And it was only on the basis of spectroscopic evidence that we could say the stars were suns like our own deriving their heat and light from hydrogen fusion. Bruno had no such evidence. Not even close. He reasoned theologically. He figured if God is Infinite then God's handiwork must be infinite as well. Plausible theology, but not science.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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I don't know much about Giordano Bruno as a scientist, but I do know he was a heavy, heavy dude in the memory department.

Back in my conducting days, Maestro Eleazar De Carvalho gave me a book to read called The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (Author) to help with my memorizing orchestra scores.

(It didn't help all that much because ancient memory techniques were predominantly visual. And music is sound. I was never any good at visualizing scores. I had to hear them in my mind. However, I was fascinated by the book. I thought it was kind of cool that temples to the gods doubled as memory prompts for what today would be public records. The "virtual scribe" would first memorize the place until he could see it clearly in his mind. Then he would file information X over in the left corner behind the urn. Information Y would go behind the right foot of the god. And so on. This information was stuff like birth and death records, the equivalent of land deeds, etc., of the community he lived in. And he would teach all this to young "virtual scribes" to keep the public records going. I need to reread the book to get the details right on this.)

There is a great deal on Bruno and his memory systems in that book. I didn't have the academic reading chops back then that I have now (and they're still not great), but I used to plow and plow at that book. I have fond memories of that experience and Giordano Bruno is part of that pleasure.

But I left everything behind when I came back to the USA. Just a couple of months ago, I bought a copy of this book again. I told Kat I was recapturing a moment of my past.

And this time when I reread it, I might just understand the damn thing. :)

Michael

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I don't know much about Giordano Bruno as a scientist, but I do know he was a heavy, heavy dude in the memory department.

Back in my conducting days, Maestro Eleazar De Carvalho gave me a book to read called The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates (Author) to help with my memorizing orchestra scores.

(It didn't help all that much because ancient memory techniques were predominantly visual. And music is sound. I was never any good at visualizing scores. I had to hear them in my mind. However, I was fascinated by the book. I thought it was kind of cool that temples to the gods doubled as memory prompts for what today would be public records. The "virtual scribe" would first memorize the place until he could see it clearly in his mind. Then he would file information X over in the left corner behind the urn. Information Y would go behind the right foot of the god. And so on. This information was stuff like birth and death records, the equivalent of land deeds, etc., of the community he lived in. And he would teach all this to young "virtual scribes" to keep the public records going. I need to reread the book to get the details right on this.)

There is a great deal on Bruno and his memory systems in that book. I didn't have the academic reading chops back then that I have now (and they're still not great), but I used to plow and plow at that book. I have fond memories of that experience and Giordano Bruno is part of that pleasure.

But I left everything behind when I came back to the USA. Just a couple of months ago, I bought a copy of this book again. I told Kat I was recapturing a moment of my past.

And this time when I reread it, I might just understand the damn thing. :smile:

Michael

Bruno was NO scientist. Galileo was the first or one of the first of that breed. Bruno was a theologian and a philosophical speculator. His claim that stars were other suns (something we regard as ordinary knowledge) had no basis in observed fact at the time Bruno postulated the claim. In his time, it was pure hot air.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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We did briefly discuss the credentials of Tyson the narrator who has some Progressive views, on another thread. I hope rational editing will continue, by Brannon Braga (of StarTrek TNG, Terra Nova, etc.) to snip out Tyson’s philosophical failings. I remember Tyson mentioned the runaway green house affect on Venus, but I believe that observation stopped cold before he could compare it to Earth. I was just coming back into the room, but the observation on Venus seemed to stop abruptly.

On the Startrek.com website Brannon discusses the new series.

Braga: I’m a producer on Cosmos, along with Ann Druyan and Seth MacFarlane. We’re re-crafting the original and re-imagining it, and it’s been an amazing experience. It’s a great honor to be a part of it. I don’t really want to say too much, except that if you’re a fan of the original, you’re going to love it, and if you’ve never seen Cosmos, it’s going to be a really memorable experience. You’ll have to ask someone at Fox when they intend to put it on. I think it’s sometime in 2014 is what they’re saying. We’re supposed to start shooting early next year. We’re in the scripting stage right now.

end quote

Cosmos is currently showing on Fox, Sunday at nine and on National Geographic Mondays at 10pm.

Bob wrote:

Bruno was a theologian and a philosophical speculator.

end quote

That was made plain in the storyline and I was surprised that they would place so much emphasis on someone who was *right* but only because of a vision or an inspiration, though Bruno had heard of other scientific theories. Certainly a thinker who is *right* is worthy of praise but he is no where near the stature of Galileo. I was pleased with the anti-religious motif, and it was correct to show religious zealotry as the real villain, and that reason is a primary.

I thought the animation was cheesy and made the new show seem as if it were more for children but I enjoyed it. It is probably cheaper to use animation instead of actors.

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Bruno was NO scientist.

Bob,

Was Bruno a fan of Aristotle?

:smile:

Michael

It doesn't matter. Bruno did not have an empirical basis for his views or theories.

Bruno did not have a telescope. All he could see with the naked eye was a few thousand stars. This is not a sound basis for asserting that the cosmos is infinite.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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My understanding is that Bruno loved the Church and simply wanted it to be correct. He studied the Copernican theory and supposedly confirmed it with his own observations,whatever that means.Copernicus was sufficiently intimidated by the Inquisition to wait until he was on his deathbed before he gave his permission for his work to be published.

I have read that Bruno taught the Copernican theory throughout Europe and England before the Inquisition lured him back by offering him some financial support, which he naively accepted only to find himself arrested and imprisoned.

Tyson doesn't mention that Bruno was offered the option to be garroted if he recanted before being set afire at the stake. I gather that he said "I would rather live a spirited life than die a cowardly death!"

Somewhat on a par with Thomas Jefferson quietly submitting to having his paragraph in which slavery was to be abolished be removed from the Declaration of Independence in response to the demand of the representatives of the Southern slave states before they would vote Yea to the Declaration. As we all know there had been an agreement that a vote for Independence would have to be unanimous.

I do wish that Tyson had spelled out some of the chemistry leading to the presence of all the building blocks necessary for DNA and RNA to be formed naturally which led to the first life forms starting the process of evolution.

gg

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