If you havent watched NDT and Seth McFarlanes revamp of the Carl Sagan classic Cosmos, it is amazing. That show and Nova, still running to this day on PBS, basically defined my childhood exposure to science. When I was in school we had to sell magazine subscriptions and I signed up for Discover. That magazine taught me about things like String Theory and The Unified Theory during a time when those were emerging ideas on the cutting edge of scientific thought. PBS isnt what it used to be for many reasons; the deep market penetration of basic cable, the creation of science specific channels such as TLC and NatGeo, and a significant decrease in viewership of both Live TV and PBS in general.. I, however, credit these sources for much of the way I see the Universe today. I still read everything I can get my hands on about String Theory and the differences between Relativity and the large scale rules of physics and Quantum Mechanics and the rules of the sub-atomic. I had the sincere pleasure of having an awesome science teacher in school who let us watch some episodes of the original Cosmos when we studied sections that the show discussed. I had parents that encouraged me to read and learn about things even if they werent familiar with the subject matter. They encouraged me to learn about things on the forefront of the scientific communitys research and ideas. Nova was my science show growing up and I watched it almost as faithfully as I watched The Simpsons or Saved By The Bell. My parents made me watch as much educational programming as was available to us at the time. Today we have shows like Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman but its not really a science show its a mass market pseudo-science show. They will forego scientific integrity to the material for ratings friendly information. I dont consider tackling questions such as Is There A God science. Science is one thing and Religion is another. Letting either interact with with the other has historically had pretty significant consequences for both the data and the scientist. Scientists should feel free to tackle such questions but as long as we have neither the evidence nor the experiments to answer the question in any meaningful way its probably best we dont teach it as Science. My Faith has never been troubled by my scientific views. I went to Catholic school for a significant portion of my life and we were taught about things like evolution and The Big Bang along side New and Old Testament and theology lessons. It never posed a problem during my education and I dont believe it should pose a problem today. Its been far too long since America was exposed to pure science on Television whose content is completely scientific and educational not Hollywood or prime time content. I hope they rerun this many times unlike Cosmos which has only aired a couple of times. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Spacetime_Odyssey
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 23:50:35 +0000
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