I got the "cosmos a spacetime Odyssey" to watch from the library. Just want to know if this guy is legit or just following an agenda to make money. Seems like he is just reading a script. Is what he is saying the actual truth? I don't just eat up any information these days as fact for obvious reasons.

He is reading a script -- one he mostly wrote.

"Cosmos" is largely fact, somewhat speculation. Usually he's clear when he's speculating, though.

Don't "trust." Verify.
Don't "believe," learn.

If he mentions something, go look up references.
Then you don't have to use "trust" or "belief."

p.s. on the whole, "Cosmos" is mostly factually correct, verified by doing the research. But don't trust ME either -- go learn.

I think I would trust you more than Tyson. I don't like the cartoon stuff in it so far haha, the evolution stuff made some sense when explained a different way than I have heard before. Seems like a smart dude though.

Most TV shows are done from a script, except for the execrable reality stuff that has plagued the airwaves over the last couple of decades. NdGT is a prominent astrophysicist and would not present any material with which he disagreed.

"Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" was written by Ann Druyan, who co-created the original "Cosmos" series with Carl Sagan, and Steven Soter, an astrophysicist.

Both the series and Tyson are completely legitimate, and worth paying attention to.

Alright just making sure it really was legitemate and I wasn't soaking up false information....once again.

If you can find it watch the original Cosmos from the 80's with Carl Sagan. I liked it better.

Bamboozled Wrote:
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> If you can find it watch the original Cosmos from
> the 80's with Carl Sagan. I liked it better.

The next time I go to the library I will see. Not the biggest fan of all the cartoon stuff. Got the cosmos book by Carl sagan. Only read a little bit so far though.

I'd trust him before I'd trust something in a book that was written before telescopes, indoor plumbing and electricity were invented.

Lethbridge Reprobate Wrote:
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> I'd trust him before I'd trust something in a book
> that was written before telescopes, indoor
> plumbing and electricity were invented.

You may have a point.

Adam...yes, the original Cosmos series is very good. It covers the material in the book Cosmos in a more entertaining way. I didn’t like all the cartoon stuff in the new remake of the Cosmos series either. Watch them both and see what you think. The original book Cosmos might be a bit of a grind to get thru...it’s hard to turn pages and eat popcorn at the same time.

The comment that was made that the book was written before electricity, indoor plumbing or telescopes doesn’t make any point at all. Most all of what is in the original Cosmos is basic science that is still relevant today. Snide remarks about the past should not be taken seriously.

I think you’ll enjoy watching both versions of Cosmos and by comparing them, you’ll learn a lot.

Yea don't think I am going to make it through this cosmos book. It looks like a lot of work.

Look up the origin of the phrase “straight from the horse’s mouth”. Rather than speculate and debate how many teeth a horse has, you could just go count them. This was once a revolutionary way of thinking.

Are you trying to tell me god is the horse or something? Or the universe is? Instead of listening to the top authorities at the time?

He is trying to tell you to stop asking other people if something is true and figure it out yourself.

People say my truth is wrong and stupid so I am trying to figure out their truth.

That is the easy button solution. Life does not have an easy button. People have to find their own truth.

sbg Wrote:
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> That is the easy button solution. Life does not
> have an easy button. People have to find their
> own truth.

Even if their truth is a delusion and false?

I think when it comes to putting together the narrative inside your head, you should let your heart be your guide. That doesn’t mean you’ll be right. It only means you’ll be “right enough”. Your ideas should always be changing according to whatever new information comes into your field. Be critical and open at the same time, but find a balance.

There are some ideas you can trust absolutely. Tyson deals in those ideas. Mathematics, you can trust. The science behind your computer, and there’s a lot of it, you can trust because all of these bazillion computers work.

You can trust evolution. You can also put your own spin on it. Nobody can prove mutations are truly random, for example. Many things in the life sciences are understood well. Others are understood so poorly that your heart knows better. Love is the substrate of reality. It’s what it’s all made of, but that’s just hippy dippy me.

I trust math because it has always made sense to me but evolution is not even close to math in my mind as far as trusting it so it's a strange position.

Math makes sense to you because you learned it, presumably at a young age. I'm guessing, here, but I'm betting you think that math makes "sense" and is trusted by most people. While evolution isn't because it feels like a bunch of ideas that are confusing and don't make "logical" sense like math does to you. (I may be wrong here).

So, I present my wife. She wasn't taught math properly, unfortunately, her teachers failed her and didn't bother to teach her, expecting the students at her school to not amount to anything beyond being uneducated factory workers, so they didn't try that hard. (I could go into all the reasons why this happened and why it's not her fault, but that gets into politics and family issues and isn't relevant to this discussion)

Why do I bring this up? Because math, even after spending a lot education to fill in those gaps in her knowledge, she doesn't "trust" math. Numbers and math are often "magic" to her. The order of operations was unknown to her. She'll avoid math and is glad that she now has a smart phone that can handle all that for her now. When we discuss something that involves numbers she has me repeat the numbers over and over again and meticulously show her how I got the numbers I did, and even then she doesn't trust the figures. She has the unfortunate tendency to think that she's not "smart" because she doesn't get basic math concepts (she's very, very smart). She's starting to get past that, but it's taken her a lot of work to fill the gaps in her knowledge and learn how math works.

Fortunately, in today's world "math" hasn't become (for the most part) a political/religious topic with another popular (magical, incorrect) answer for why 1+1=2. Otherwise she might be lead to believe that "magic" is the answer and that the "science" behind math is uncomfortable and therefore can't possibly be true.

This is what's happened to you. For years, people have told you that moon is made of cheese, to the point that other answers, including the fact that someone has traveled there and brought back rocks is to "complicated" or too "big" an idea to handle.

It's hard to break down these barriers for a lot of reasons.You can learn the concepts behind evolution, they aren't that difficult when you get to the basics (just like math). The hard part is getting past the idea that there are other ideas out there that might be better than the one that's stuck in your head.

Babyloncansuckit Wrote:
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> Look up the origin of the phrase “straight from
> the horse’s mouth”. Rather than speculate and
> debate how many teeth a horse has, you could just
> go count them. This was once a revolutionary way
> of thinking.
Kinda tough to go look inside of a black hole when the closest one to us is 25k ly away.
At a certain point, you cant just go look for yourself.

koriwhore Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Kinda tough to go look inside of a black hole when
> the closest one to us is 25k ly away.
> At a certain point, you cant just go look for
> yourself.

You don't need to in order to know everything "science" knows about black holes.

You can observe SagA* with your own telescope. If you have the right kind of camera, you can image the region. If you image the region on a regular schedule, you can use the images to observe & calculate the velocity of stars close-in to the black hole. You can calculate, from those motions and from stellar masses, the black hole's gravity. And much more.

I've done all those and more from my backyard. Without going there.

I was reading about "the cosmos" in National Geographic before Dr. Tyson was born. I was encouraged to read anything I wanted by my parents and I did. Science has always been fascinating to me.
Creationism, not so much.

Lethbridge Reprobate Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I was reading about "the cosmos" in National
> Geographic before Dr. Tyson was born. I was
> encouraged to read anything I wanted by my parents
> and I did. Science has always been fascinating to
> me.
> Creationism, not so much.

Creationism doesn't fascinate me either but is their only two options of how we got here?

The idea that we evolved from like a fish is almost as weird as a divine creator creating everything.

Check out the Inner Fish series on PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/your-inner-fish/home/

Wonderful series that really captures the excitement of science and discovery.

Something that really helped me in trying to conceptualize what happened. Is to understand the amount of time it took for this to happen. So here goes

If you put the earth's history, 4,500,000,000 years, on a football field every yard would be 45,000,000 years. Every foot would be 15,000,000 years and every inch would be 1,250,000 years. Humanity would have only been on the earth for 1/5 of an inch of the entire football field, or 200,000 years.

Point being that there has been plenty of time for evolution to happen.

Is that enough time for evolution to happen? A fish turning into a man? Seems like a huge jump even for that many years but I don't know.

Yes, it is plenty of time. If anything the earth itself has impeded the progress. If the earth had settled in on one climate and atmosphere a billion years earlier we would be the wormhole humans from Interstellar by now.

I couldn't even sit through that interstellar movie haha. So slow. Maybe one day I'll force myself to sit through it.

"Not one change of species into another is on record . . we cannot prove that a single species has been changed." My Life and Letters Charles Darwin

As for black holes, dark matter, dark energy--I doubt that anyone in this thread knows how that got started.

As far as mathematics goes, it is just a logical system of symbols. If you insert into a mathematical equation an unproven premise it will turn out garbage because what went in was garbage. Mathematics does not distinguish between reality and fiction.

My response: go do a lot more reading and be very skeptical of any physicist who does not spend a lot of time in laboratory work. ESPECIALLY "astro" physicists, "theoretical" physicists, and the bulk of astronomers.

jb Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Not one change of species into another is on
> record . . we cannot prove that a single species
> has been changed." My Life and Letters Charles
> Darwin

There is no such book as "My Life and Letters" by Charles Darwin.

His son put together a book titled, "The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin" after his death in 1887...but that's not the same thing.

And the quote you give does not appear in the book. Something almost like it does, but that doesn't.

Finally, you do realize that Darwin lived/died a very long time ago, and that since then "speciation" has been observed numerous times...don't you?

> be very
> skeptical of any physicist who does not spend a
> lot of time in laboratory work. ESPECIALLY "astro"
> physicists, "theoretical" physicists, and the bulk
> of astronomers.

I would add to be very, VERY skeptical of people who post fake, made-up quotes from books that don't exist. See above.

Badassadam1 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Creationism doesn't fascinate me either but is
> their only two options of how we got here?

No.
There are an infinite number of "options" or "possibilities."
Of that infinite number, which one(s) have evidence to show they're likely correct?

"Creationism?" Nope. Zero, zip. nada.
"Space Aliens dropped their seeds here?" Ditto.

Evolution by natural selection? Literally hundreds of millions of independent, verifiable pieces of evidence in support.

How about that :)

ificouldhietokolob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Badassadam1 Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Creationism doesn't fascinate me either but is
> > their only two options of how we got here?
>
> No.
> There are an infinite number of "options" or
> "possibilities."
> Of that infinite number, which one(s) have
> evidence to show they're likely correct?
>
> "Creationism?" Nope. Zero, zip. nada.
> "Space Aliens dropped their seeds here?" Ditto.
>
> Evolution by natural selection? Literally
> hundreds of millions of independent, verifiable
> pieces of evidence in support.
>
> How about that :)

Aaaaalright not bad. That's more impressive. I kind of like the aliens from another planet idea though haha. Who built the pyramids in Egypt? Got to be aliens.

Nope, just Egyptians. Lots and lots of 'em.

Why do you have to take the fun out of everything?

:)

The thing is, knowing what really occurred (and we do) is actually more "fun" than making stuff up. Part of the reason, for example, we know that Egyptians built them is from the discovered record-keeping of the building supervisors -- where they noted their boat trips to pick up/drop off stone, how much grain and beer the workers were given per day, and more. It's fascinating and "fun" stuff! And it's factual!


https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ancient-egypt-shipping-mining-farming-economy-pyramids-180956619/

Scientists are not immune from emotion and sometimes they can give more credence to their pet theories than is justified. That is why you were encouraged above to read and research more.

If you listen to Tyson you might learn something.

I don't know what happened to a post I made singing deGrasse Tyson's praise (he's available on YouTube); it may have been a computer glich, but he and Dr. Kaku are two of the most articulate "science sorts" out there.

#remedial schoolteacher voice on

In the 20 years I've visited RFM, the actual "damage" an LDS upbringing does to critical thinking skills has been obvious; I was hammered myself growing up on Planet Utah, and memories of what happened are what drive my participation here.

Edit: Okay I found my post; I may have not sent it; who knows but I permit myself a senior moment now and then...


JMHO, But Neil deGrasse Tyson is an Incredible Man...

I subscribe to both his and Dr. Kaku's "channels" on YouTube, and I've never found anything to question even though the "mathematics of their physics" is beyond my educational level (I kind of flamed out of second year calculus way back when, but in the area of the sciences, I "tested out" of all of the requirements with a score in the 99th percentile).

Growing up in Utah, I "beat a path over to the humanities" in high school because much of the science curriculum was taught by Mormons (the biology teacher was a BYU-educated joke, seriously). I think it saved my sanity as far as my "adjusting to society" goes (although I obviously had my struggles).

Know-nothings will dismiss him as a "celebrity scientist," but it's usually obvious what their limitations and agendas are.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/27/2018 02:19PM by SL Cabbie.

So Dave the atheist says Tyson is legit, that actually means something.

Hop David,

This is not a forum for you to advertise your blog or vent your frustrations about Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is a forum for recovering Mormons to talk about their personal experiences.

Your posts have been removed because they are completely off-topic and because they advertise a personal blog, which is against the forum rules.

I don't know how you happened upon this conversation because we haven't seen you participating here before, but I'm wondering if you spend your time googling likely search terms and then jumping into internet conversations to promote your blog and argue with others about your personal preoccupations. Please don't do that here.

If you are a recovering Mormon, then you're welcome to participate here with on-topic posts. Otherwise, please stay away.

Thanks,

CZ (admin)

Concrete zipper is the man. I like it.

I believe Seth MacFarlane was one of the executive producers of the new 'Cosmos', and I believe that's why there's so much animation in it--also IMO there was just too much "And then the church tried suppress astronomer/scientist *insert name here*...", which seemed a bit over the top for a science show, and seemed a plus for an atheism agenda, which I'm sure MacFarlane was just fine with.

I suspect that 'Family Guy' is porn as far as TBM's are concerned...

Yea I saw Seth macfarlenes name and was like what the heck, can I really take this seriously.

I trust him.

This is enough for me. Besides, he's enjoyable to listen to, and fun. I live his analogies. I learn a lot from him. Remembering it is another thing, however....

......Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted NOVA ScienceNow and makes media appearances to encourage science and space exploration.

Born and raised in New York City, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discovered his love for the stars at an early age. After studying at Harvard University, he earned his doctorate from Columbia University in 1991. Tyson went to work for the Hayden Planetarium in 1996 and still serves as its director. He hosted the NOVA ScienceNow series from 2006 to 2011. Tyson remains a popular TV science expert today and has amassed over 12 million followers on Twitter.

SusieQ#1 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I trust him.
>
> This is enough for me. Besides, he's enjoyable to
> listen to, and fun. I live his analogies. I learn
> a lot from him. Remembering it is another thing,
> however....
>
> ......Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted
> NOVA ScienceNow and makes media appearances to
> encourage science and space exploration.
>
> Born and raised in New York City, astrophysicist
> Neil deGrasse Tyson discovered his love for the
> stars at an early age. After studying at Harvard
> University, he earned his doctorate from Columbia
> University in 1991. Tyson went to work for the
> Hayden Planetarium in 1996 and still serves as its
> director. He hosted the NOVA ScienceNow series
> from 2006 to 2011. Tyson remains a popular TV
> science expert today and has amassed over 12
> million followers on Twitter.
And he still hosts Star Talk and is responsible for resurrecting the Cosmos Series, after 25yrs, with Sagans widow, Ann.
He was Sagan's protege.
If he was good enough for Sagan to trust, why wouldn't I?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/27/2018 08:23PM by koriwhore.

I'm trying not to be bored watching it. The first DVD was alright.