Fox Network will be premiering the new Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey this Sunday, March 9th, hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson. I'm feeling so torn about it. I want to see it. I want it to be good. And at the same time part of me feels like a sacrilege is happening. Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage feels like sacred ground where one is to tread lightly and with deep reverence. Long before there were any edutainment channels and programming and all the graphics and effects and wizardry we have today on demand on so many channels, long before any of that, a kindly, earnest, soft spoken Jewish fellah from Brooklyn took me to the stars. That's magic.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to this, too, and yes, the PBS version was great. It concerns me a lot that this is being shown on Fox, so I'm a little skeptical. But it's hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, so I have some hope. I also really really really hope it's good.
I finally watched it today and I thought it was rather good and very respectful to the original. At the end when he pulls out Carl's calendar from the 70's and the book he signed for Neil, explaining how he had helped him when he was a teenager, it was like seeing sacred texts.
My Science teacher pulled it up online for us to watch. Half of us fell asleep and the other half talked or doodled. I just don't like science. //shot. I do like biology though. Like the social constructs of animals and tools and things. But that's it.
I think you have to have been 10 years old in 1980 and a nerdy boy in love with the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan for this new version of Cosmos to make you feel: When Neil busted out Carl's original calendar book where he had written Neil's name, I actually cried. True story.
I am really going to enjoy this. Physics and astronomy was what I wanted to study, if it wasn't for my mental health problems.
The show is making waves, it seems, for the rather novel approach it has taken when tackling certain subjects like the big bang, evolution, and global warming. There is absolutely no pandering to POV's from outside of the scientific epistemology. This may not be a big deal to those outside the U.S., but for we Muricans, it's been quite a while since a science program of this scale and intended broad spectrum audience (it premiered across something like 10 cable channels all at once) hasn't muffled empirical data to placate sensitivities coming from other epistemologies. http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/03/science-deniers-cosmos-neil-tyson
I've been meaning to check out this show for some time now. I'll make sure to watch it on Sunday. One thing that cracks me up is that this show airs on Fox.
IKR? So bizarre. I watch it on National Geographic where it airs on Monday nights now, just the premier was on Sunday. Also, last night's episode has animated sequences of William and John Hershel where Sir Patrick Stewart, one of the Seven Founts of Awesome, voices William Hershel. I got all tingly just listening.
Love this show! I don't like it as much as Sagan's version, but there are no words for how nice the eye candy is!
This show is not uninteresting, but the animation is so ugly it's distracting. The original had very bright and crisp animations. These are too dark and angular. By over stylizing the cartoons with the overuse of dark lighting and angular features it has made the historical narratives feel less, rather than more lifelike, which is the whole point of animating the events rather than just telling the story. The animation is also extremely 2d. The characters slide across the backgrounds without every looking like they are in them, the hallmark of lazy animation. Historical content-wise the show is fine, I liked the episode about Halley and Newton.
I like the show and think it's a worthy successor to the original. Some of the graphics are spectacular but I was disturbed by the graphics of electrons orbiting atomic nuclei. It was terribly inaccurate, physically. I would have expected better. I notice also they seem to be making a point of highlighting the contributions women made during the early years of modern astronomy. At least they did in the last couple of episodes. I think that's a good thing.
Was the motion of electrons around atoms represented by one of those grass skirt hula girls or something?
I really like the 3D CG, the other not so much. I do like the content of those animated scenes, however. I really liked when it showed the mechanism of DNA replication and cells. Isn't it pretty much impossible to show a scale atom model due to the extreme difference in size between protons/neutrons and electrons, plus Hiesenberg? Though I do agree on wishing they showed how orbitals work. I didn't realize how many minority [gender and race] figures in science are so suppressed, it's very depressing. Things like star naming and location, and plate tectonics are important to modern concepts. I feel like the general American audience doesn't care about this sort of thing anymore. Learning about the universe is considered to be unnecessary.
The graphic that bothered me showed an electron orbiting the nucleus in a planet-like orbit except with it moving up and down around the plane of the orbit in a wave-like manner. A better representation of the math is the "orbital" as BoddaGetta mentioned: a three dimensional wave shown as a kind of cloud wrapped back on itself. I've seen some nice graphics in, for example, chemistry books.
