What is this buffoonery? This doesn't even sound like real science!
"In order to create an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
"I am not very good at singing, but I will try. Poof! Phew! Poof! Phew!"
"A still more glorious dawn awaits us, not to a sunrise, but a galaxyrise. A morning filled with 400 billion suns."
"Space is filled with a network of wormholes, you might emerge somewhere else in space."
This is just an infotainment to amuse twelve year olds, so I guess it served that purpose for me at that age, although I never felt I got anything out of it, not one bit of enlightenment, but just some fanciful ideas that don't really mean anything. Nice mental masturbation, and that's it. I liked that "sense of wonder" feeling, but there are science fiction novels and Lovecraft stories that do a better job.
All this sounds more like spiritual shamanism than anything. Actually, I was never really good at high school physics, because it made very little sense to me. I mean, atoms have one tiny nucleus, and then relatively a football field's size of free space beyond which you have electrons randomly moving around. Uh huh, so if there is so much free space, why couldn't matter pass through other matter? Attraction and repulsion, supposedly, it's just that simple. And yet still it still doesn't explain why those protons are held together in the nucleus.
I am saying all this in frustration at all the news about the Large Hardon Collider. A means of finding the "God" particle. A bird in France dropped a croissant on the machine and it malfunctioned. A Japanese scientist then concluded that the LHC was sabotaging itself from the future, as it had time travelled there in its operation, and thus wanted to destroy the LHC in the past itself in order to prevent the universe from exploding. What a joke! Is this what theoretical physics is?
Someone once was remarking from what he learnt in Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals And Society that while engineers and doctors are judged by end results and output, an intellectual's work is judged and valued by other intellectuals. And this theoretical physics of modern age is all input and no output, and now I am disgusted to be a member of the human race when billions of dollars are being spent on phoney scientific research.
We didn't achieve division of labour, specialization, trade, property, and capital generation just to waste it all on mediocrity of fraudulent "scientific progress", which only exists after these things and not before. What this actually means is that we did not create civilization to squander it on these useless scientists who live off on government grants and donations.
Prateek Sanjay:This is just an infotainment to amuse twelve year olds, so I guess it served that purpose for me at that age, although I never felt I got anything out of it, not one bit of enlightenment, but just some fanciful ideas that don't really mean anything. Nice mental masturbation, and that's it. I liked that "sense of wonder" feeling, but there are science fiction novels and Lovecraft stories that do a better job.
The billions and billions of moons, planets, stars, and galaxies really blew my mind when I was a kid. He was a total pot-head, so that may tell you why his show was filled with so many "whoa..." moments.
Did you actually see the original Cosmos episodes where those quotes are from? Because they are definitely scientific and informing, and awareness raising.
For example, did you know that he was explaining the sound that whales made/make when communicating across oceans?
Carl Sagan is the man. No one considers him some ground-breaking scientist and as such I don't think your critique of him is fair. He is known as the dude that popularized astronomy, god knows how many minds he has inspired to learn more about the universe around them. Even beyond that I think he qualifies more as a historian, or a science historian, then an actual scientist. The sense of awe and fluffy language he used was meant to draw in your everyday Joe to stop and really think about the meaning of his existence.
I propose that you are the one who is masturbating mentally.
I do agree that there is billions being wasted in areas of "scientific" research
How come all the quotes you posted are from that funny remix video where his voice was synthesized into a song? You do realize that it was an entire series?
this one is really good as well.
I've only read a couple, or perhaps a dozen, of Prateek Sanjay's posts, and I'm beginning to think he's a satirist.
EDIT:
I'm not even saying that I fully disagree with the point that Carl Sagan's show was more edutainment than science, and that some of those above quotes are so poetic (sometimes badly so) that they sound out of place in a science show, but that's "popular science" for you. It has to be watered down.
The main problem I have with the above post, and why I think it might be satirical in nature, is the discrediting of theoretical science at large based on some scientists supposedly making ridiculous claims at times.
Any links to origional series / etc... something that is recommended?
Never really paid attention to him..
Conza88: Any links to origional series / etc... something that is recommended? Never really paid attention to him..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_%28TV_series%29
I watched all of it roughly a year ago and it was amazing.
If you're getting into this sort of thing I would also recommend Life on Earth (1979), and after that the whole Life Collection:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_Collection
The difference between these series and something like Planet Earth is that they're meant to give you real insight and understanding whereas Planet Earth is more about the eye-candy (though still impressive). Life on Earth is all about evolution and the rest of the series flows from that. I don't think Planet Earth even touched upon that.
And also:
* Susan Greenfield - Brain Story* BBC Space (*)* BBC The Planets (* possibly watch these two before Cosmos)* Martin Rees - What we still don't know