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Carl Sagan's 13 part PBS 1980 series Cosmos... worth watching?

Muse

Muse

Lifer
I had no TV in 1980. Am reading Sagan's likely last book, published the year he died, 1996, The Demon-Haunted World. Am finding it very interesting, am only in about 20 pages, went to Wikipedia out of curiosity to read about Carl Sagan.

Turns out I was a physics student in early 1960's at UC Berkeley at the same time Sagan was in graduate studies there. I also visited a friend going to Harvard in 1964 when Sagan was there teaching. I eventually switched from physics to math at UC Berkeley, Sagan left Harvard when they denied him tenure and moved on to Ithaca, NY to eventual professorship at Cornell.

Well, this 13 part PBS series is the most watched ever at 500 million people world wide. I'm not deep in astrophysics, but obviously have some grounding in physics and chemistry.

Am I going to find this too elementary to hold my interest or is it worth spending $45 for the Ultimate Blu-ray or DVD series. I see reviews saying the BR is barely an improvement on the DVD series, so I'm not sure which I'd buy. I saw online where you could watch this on Twitch TV but I'm not seeing that option, maybe it died there.

Thanks for commentary, etc.
 
The series was groundbreaking back in the day. It is targeted to those who have limited science knowledge.

It goes from the earliest days of science/astronomy to the present. Explores planets and stars and our place in them.

It's a great series but it can drag on a bit. The music is awesome. The special effects were good at the time.

Whether it's worth the $45 is up to you.

🙂

EDIT: you can check it out on youtube:

 
The Demon-Haunted World pdf (438 pages)



I just realized that I'm older than him by about 8 months 3 weeks, when he died Dec 20.1996 . 😀





Deleted link to download copyrighted material. No piracy allowed here.

AT Moderator ElFenix
 
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i am not familiar with it so i should probably keep my mouth shut, but against better judgment i would say .. no.
Science has moved forward a lot since the 80s, and while Sagan was a really cool guy who smoked weed and probably banged his students (yay 1980s!), you can get better stuff today just by looking on youtube.
 
I never saw the original series back in the 80's so i can't help you there. Probably would still be good but outdated.

I see the latest installment of the new series is coming to network TV:
Cosmos: Possible Worlds
The series is scheduled to have a broadcast television premiere on Fox on September 22, 2020
Click to expand...
 
Hmm. Well, am starting chapter three of The Demon-Haunted World tonight. Extremely well written and thought out book. So quotable it's amazing. I know a whole lot of what he's saying but have encountered a new idea or two. But just great to have all these ideas framed for me. He was actually very prescient concerning the deterioration of our culture in this time. This isn't coming off as dated at all. Publication date 1996, the year he died at 62.
 
DigDog said:
i am not familiar with it so i should probably keep my mouth shut, but against better judgment i would say .. no.
Science has moved forward a lot since the 80s, and while Sagan was a really cool guy who smoked weed and probably banged his students (yay 1980s!), you can get better stuff today just by looking on youtube.
Click to expand...

I mean...kinda. Not all of the sciences progress at the same rate. Cosmos is mostly astrophyscis, and you could say that a lot of that hasn't really changed much, except that what was then general theory in a lot of areas, has now been proven true with better technology. Discovery wise, the math hasn't changed that much.

Chemisty and Organic chemistry. I mean....that hasn't "really" changed in more than 70 years. Nothing beyond "We made a new synthetic elements that exists for 15 nanoseconds!"

Cosmos does get into Biology and Genetics a bit, though. Now that, well, just ignore most of that because it doesn't make much sense today. 😀 Hell, it would have been outdated 10 years ago.
 
It was decent back in the day...but our knowledge and understanding of space and the cosmos have improved a LOT since then. Hell, Pluto used to be a planet...no more. :colbert:
 
BoomerD said:
It was decent back in the day...but our knowledge and understanding of space and the cosmos have improved a LOT since then. Hell, Pluto used to be a planet...no more. :colbert:
Click to expand...

I was 10 when Cosmos came out. It was fun to watch back in the day.

I was watching a bit of the video posted above. Sagan mentions the width of the Local Group / Local Cluster was 3 million light years across. Wikipedia shows a diameter of 10 million light years.

That reminds me of the lyrics of the Rolling Stones Song "Its so very lonely, your 2,000 light years from home":


..Sagan would probably say, "2,000 light years? You mean next door?"
 
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i would say that we have a currently-living personality who is *very* similar to the late Sagan, in professor Brian Cox. His videos are a joy to watch, and i would recommend you gave them a try.
 
DigDog said:
i would say that we have a currently-living personality who is *very* similar to the late Sagan, in professor Brian Cox. His videos are a joy to watch, and i would recommend you gave them a try.
Click to expand...
That link to Brian Cox isn't working right now, says the Youtube video poster's account has been cancelled. 🙁

Well, I did a search for Brian Cox on Youtube and came up with stuff, just watched ~12 minute highlight video that was quite excellent. In it he happens to mention "Cosmos," "the famous 13th episode..."

 
Thank you Muse.
i wanted to reply posting a video that, as you would imagine, has been absorbed by Google's copyright machine.
I can link a non-paywall text version, but it was great to hear Cox explain "why ghosts aren't real".
because he coldly destroyed ghosts in about 30 seconds on non-refutable arguments.
linkylink: https://www.shortlist.com/news/brian-cox-large-hadron-collider-ghosts
The sauce:
What is a ghost? Well, it must be massless – by definition, they cannot be made of matter. Therefore, they must only be made of energy. In addition, they must carry information that relates to previously living cells – the energy must have some form of ‘memory’.

But something made of energy would quickly dissipate. Thus, they require their own, matter-less energy source – an idea that does not exist in the standard model of physics, nor in anything the LHC has discovered.

If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern, and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made. We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies.
Click to expand...
 
DigDog said:
Thank you Muse.
i wanted to reply posting a video that, as you would imagine, has been absorbed by Google's copyright machine.
I can link a non-paywall text version, but it was great to hear Cox explain "why ghosts aren't real".
because he coldly destroyed ghosts in about 30 seconds on non-refutable arguments.
linkylink: https://www.shortlist.com/news/brian-cox-large-hadron-collider-ghosts
The sauce:
Click to expand...
Having been a physics major, I don't need convincing of the absurdity of thinking ghosts have a reality outside being simply, shall we say, figments of the imagination. Cox is excellent, in particular the beginning of that 12:30 video I posted above. Some of his other videos are somewhat distressing, not because of him but because of the clownishness or foolishness of the people he's forced to interact with.
 
No I did not. I do not do torrents. Never have or will. And the old school NNTP I stopped more than five years ago. One just needs to Google it and several options come up in terms of free TV including the show. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the nation's PBS station's websites offer it, too.
 
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