Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

BoldW_sl said:

Ptolemy mapped the stars but couldn't figure out why the planets kept moving back and forth - called it God. Newton figured out the orbits, pretty much inventing calculus in the process - hit a barrier in his calculations - called it god.

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So what you're saying is God was the Dark Matter of his time. (Edit: Hopefully this isn't required, but please don't take this post as serious anyone.)

Lithose_sl said:

(Edit: Hopefully this isn't required, but please don't take this post as serious anyone.)

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Blah, take away my fun why don't you.

Edit* Nevermind. *sigh*

Young earth creationists elevate my blood pressure. They possess an highly evolved and beautifully obstinate collection of personal opinions.

lendarios_sl said:

. And that is a wild especulation.

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What isn't wild speculation is that when he got to the limits of his knowledge, he invoked God and stopped looking into it. We don't know if he could have found out more, but we do know that religion certainly stopped him from looking deeper into things like the stability of planetary orbits.

khalid_sl said:

What isn't wild speculation is that when he got to the limits of his knowledge, he invoked God and stopped looking into it. We don't know if he could have found out more, but we do know that religion certainly stopped him from looking deeper into things like the stability of planetary orbits.

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Yes!

"God of the Gaps"

Dear theists, even if you carefully and thoughtfully and ever so gently place God into the gaps of our collective knowledge, then you are still placing him into an area that is guaranteed to keep shrinking forever. (or at least as long as humans think and share thoughts)

Newton was a brilliant man who deserves our respect and gratitude for what he gave us. But when he ran in to the Three Body Problem and threw his hands in the air and said, "I give up! It must be God!".. I don't respect that singular act. I respect the man and everything he accomplished, but he made a mistake when he invoked God to explain the Three Body Problem. A generation later and Laplace solved it all anyway, as expected.

That said, I encourage modern theistic people who believe in the God of the Gaps! They are on an inexorable path towards neverending diminishing philosophical returns. As their families bear out the generations, the thought process of Grandpa and Great Grandpa will get very surely and inevitably expunged from their familial zeitgeist. And it will have been modern day Grandpa's willingness to place his God into a shrinking room made out of our gaps that will have started it all. =) I encourage all of you theists to keep praying to the God of the Gaps! Please, for the sake of your grandchildren and mine, keep pushing your Gap-God on your family! Create new atheists! Go go go!

Tuco_sl said:

I don't even think I disagree with you but this was a really creepy paragraph.

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Creepy? Hmm.

I wonder why it's creepy?

God only exists in our collective imagination of 'Him'. I want us to stop imagining God. I want God to 'die' in that way. I know that it will be a long slow and painful death. That is regrettable as I am not out to cause pain, but if I were to kill some random bacteria in my lungs with an antibiotic or two, I wouldn't really care all that much if the bacteria felt pain, you know?

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you. I want to take what you said as a compliment but I'm not sure.

*edit*
Is it creepy that I brought God up in the Cosmos thread?

They left out my favorite leaded gasoline thing. In the early days of TEL production the facilities were embarrassingly shit. A lot of people died, and untold more were crippled for life. In the span of five days something like 40 workers died or were permanently disabled. In response one of the inventors staged a safety demonstration in which he inhaled the vapors for a minute and poured some on his hand, and claimed he could do that every day and it would never have any adverse effects on his health.

He was mostly bedridden for almost an entire year while he underwent treatments for severe lead poisoning. He would go on to invent/ discover CFCs with an alarming knack for figuring out the regrettable before contacting polio and strangling himself with his Rube Goldberg pully system.

This episode was about 3% content, 97% made up historical conversations

God of the Gaps has always been something of a theosophic misunderstanding. It's good in that it gets out of the way of empiricism, but it's bad for the exact same reason. If you're busy defining what God is not all you're really doing is defining what God is. And it doesn't take very long, or very deep thought, to realize that you cannot define what God IS any better than they manage to do it in Revelation.

And John was a crazy person.

Sylas_sl said:

scientifically shaky topic.

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wat

Here we go...

They just had to say the asshole was from Cincinnati...

Dabamf_sl said:

This episode was about 3% content, 97% made up historical conversations

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This was my problem with the episode as well. The tiny bit of actual science was good, the dude hallucinating and freaking out in the grocery store... come on.

I would have liked to see more of the atomic bond science explored and explained in greater detail.

I was doing some reading on Patterson, and apparently the "duck soup" comment that was made actually occurred. I couldn't find anything about him freaking out as portrayed in last night's episode, though he was pretty big on trying to get lead out of our lives. Lead was still being used in food containers/cans up until 1993. There are no nontoxic levels of lead. People today have about 625 times more lead in them than before the 20s, with an estimated 25% of men getting to see some of the the effects of this during their lifetime (looks like heart related illness due to lead is the big one).

I think this quote I found form Patterson should have been put in the show as it is every bit, if not more, relevant today:

It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to cooperate and collaborate with industries in investigating and deciding whether public health is endangered,? Clair said. ?It is a direct abrogation and violation of the duties and responsibilities of those public health organizations.

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Was probably the most focused episode so far:

- the same element that enabled us to judge the age of the earth is also a deadly poison

- example of industry attempting to suppress scientific data in order to maintain profits from a product that is mass poisoning society (see also asbestos, tobacco, CFCs, DDT, dozens of medicines, weight loss supplements, etc.)

- pushing research in spite of mass denial or opposition

All points quite appropriate for a science show. Good stuff.

I remember reading what I thought were entirely credible theories that the lead glaze which Romans used in their pottery contributed to the degradation of the empire as a whole. Very slowly, and very subtly, people just got dumber and sicker. Which in turn led to a lot of the avoidable stresses within the Empire.

I dunno how true it is, but it sounds good.