#Cosmos ,#Science and #Culture Facing a supernova of TV rivals, Foxs Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey launched with a solid 8.5 million viewers from 10 networks Sunday night, according to Nielsen. Solid maybe, but nothing to write home about given the heavy promotion and multiple cable outlets. Lets admit it, Cosmos used 10 networks to achieve about what Duck Men gets with one. Which is more the pity because it was a very well produced show, visually stunning and very educational in the big picture sort of way, and we can assume that many of the remaining planned episodes will get into the nitty gritty of things. Hopefully, there will be a large enough audience to justify it. We are in a revolutionary period in technology, theoretical physics and cosmology, and the world is waiting to see if a consistent grand scheme will emerge. At the time of the original Cosmos, the PBS series in 1980, the view of Sagan and his contemporaries was that we were only a few years away from a Grand Unifying Theory, in other words, the picture of the Universe was almost complete. Instead the evidence indicates that the Grand Unifying Theory is further away than ever as in the years after the original Cosmos evidence and satellite observation have left the Grand Unifying Theory in tatters. The nature of the problem is relatively simple, but the solution MUCH more difficult. If we accept the normal picture of the birth of the universe as an explosion (Big Bang Theory) we know that explosions do not speed up. There is the explosion, and as the energy dissipates, the items expelled by explosion slow down. But advanced satellite imaging indicates a SPEEDING UP of the expansion of the Universe! This was a shock, and something virtually no acceptable cosmological model expected in 1980. To try to make the math work, we would require more mass in the universe, A LOT MORE. So the idea of dark matter emerged. To make the math work, it was conjectured that more than 80% of the universe was this invisible, stuff that could not be seen or measure in any but that MUST be there, to make the math of the Big Bang and the accelerated expansion match out. It is, to say the least, an embarrassment to the astronomers and the cosmologists to have to rely on this invisible mystery material to make their models work. It sounds a bit too mystical. The Higgs Boson problem is much more complex, and I will leave it to you to put higgs boson and supersymmetry into the Google search bar and then spend the next few years reading what you find. The Higgs particle was supposedly found at The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in early 2013 but created more questions than answers: livescience/27893-higgs-boson-implications.html Making a Grand Unified Theory rational and symmetrical means more particles must be found, and some conjecture says that an accelerator loop bigger around than the solar system would be needed! Interestingly, they did not mention this when they built the 17 mile loop (approximate cost of 6.4 billion dollars) until the paint was dry! Will Cosmos and its affable astrophysicist host Neil deGrasse Tyson mention the above problems? I doubt it. The show is intended to popularize science, not to question it too hard or get too complicated. For that we should be thankful. It will be the job of the next generation to try to answer the hard questions, but they must first be made aware that science exists. latimes/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-tv-ratings-cosmos-20140310,0,1467031.story#axzz2vhjNKKEk
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 01:39:39 +0000
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