Cosmos: A Spacetime Travesty

Watching this on DVD with the captions on allowed me to identify an array of failures of science, reason, and fact. 

The curtain opened with a quote from Carl Sagan: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” The rest of the series denies that and betrays Sagan’s legacy with frequent allusions to “alternate universes” and “alternate realities.” But those do not exist except as subsets of the universe: all that ever was, is, or will be. That was Carl Sagan’s worldview; and it is the metaphysics and epistemology of rational-empiricism which is the scientific method. But the scientific method is not applied in this series while vague assertions and imaginative claims are touted as “great mysteries” and even “miracles.” 

The failure to adhere to the scientific method led to a cascade of ignorant statements about evolution and the origin of species. Contrary to the narrative of how wolves and humans learned to get along (Episode 2: Some of the Things that Molecules Do), the fact is that crosses of wolves and dogs can produce fertile offspring. They are not species as Darwin defined them. Neither are polar bears. 

Discussing the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton, (Episode 3: When Knowledge Conquered Fear) Dr. Tyson never mentions the fact that Newton’s theory of gravity—powerful as it was in defining not just a branch of science, but the worldview of a civilization—cannot be extended beyond two bodies in empty space. Any 3-body or n-body problem can only be solved for specially restricted cases or by repetitive numerical methods and reliance on compiled tables of direct observations. 

If you stop to read the words and reflect on the content, you realize that there is at once more and less here than meets the eyes and ears. That is a message from the opening of Episode 6: Deeper and Deeper Still, and it is presented in a way that denies the legacy of Carl Sagan. Dr. Tyson says: “Seeing is not believing. Our senses deceive us. Even the stars are not what they appear to be. The cosmos as revealed by science is stranger than we ever could have imagined. Light, and time, and space, and gravity conspire to create realities which lie beyond human experience.” 

But discovering the cosmos is the human experience. Epistemology, psychology, and physiology all inform us that our senses are accurate and precise. Why are the senses of bees, birds, and beavers reliable for them, but ours are specially cursed?  Like them all, we, too, evolved on Earth and adapted to its changing environments. Our senses are in and of the world.  Moreover, we invent and construct transducers – telescopes, microscopes, electroscopes, spectroscopes – that extend and enhance our senses. Would you suggest that the rings of Saturn and the nucleus of a paramecium are not real?

We fail ourselves with bad ideas that deny the evidence delivered by our senses. The scientific method unites the rational and experiential, the theoretical and practical, the synthetic and analytic. Physical reality does not plot against us. We are in and of the universe. That was Carl Sagan’s message from the very beginning.

Episode 14: The Immortals includes several errors across the curriculum of general science. Attempting to explain that we are broadcasting messages into the cosmos, Dr. Tyson offers Project Diana, an effort of the US Army Signal Lab to reflect radar with the Moon as the target. However, our electrical signals were already going out for a hundred years because just closing and opening the DC circuits of telegraphs from the 1840s caused electro-magnetic pulses. And radio transmissions began in the next generation. Anyone who knows the work of Carl Sagan knows that Contact gave the honor of the first the television broadcast into outer space to the opening of the 1936 Olympics. As for Project Diana, contrary to the cartoon, the radar signals from the Earth station did not go sweeping past the Moon. They were targeted to be as close to a lunar diameter as possible in order to maximize the return signal. Most of that, about 95% of the reflection, was scattered into space. But that is not what we were shown. 

Dr. Tyson’s script had him say that the civilizations of 2200 BCE all collapsed because of a worldwide drought. It was easy to claim in 2014. By 2018 that event was arguable. (Read about the Meghalayan debate.) Even so, the script says that among the civilizations that collapsed in 2200 BCE was that of Greece, but Greece had no such civilization then. 

The main point of Episode 14 was that life on Earth could have originated with entities in meteorites. But where did those organisms come from? Cosmos says that they evolved on other planets and were hurled into space by asteroid impacts on those alien worlds. But, then where did they come from? We have an infinite chain of antecedents. The fact is that long polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) such as naphthalene (C₁₀H₈) and anthracene (C₁₄H₁₀), are known to exist in nebulae. Dr. Tyson’s script correctly identified carbon as the key to life on Earth. And carbon seems plentiful in free space. 

Dr. Tyson says that bacteria from outer space are constantly and continuously landing on Earth in meteorites. He suggests that perhaps all life on Earth evolved from such bacteria. But they are fairly complex lifeforms. How could simpler life have devolved from them? If you stop and think about it, was it those alien organisms and not their host asteroids that eradicated life on Earth in massive extinctions? That possibility suggested by their premise seems not to have occurred to Ann Druyan and Steven Soter who wrote the scripts that Neil Degrasse Tyson spoke to us.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Scientific Method 

Great Scientific Experiments 

Four Books About Bad Science 

Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies 

Rescuing Aristotle and the Church 

Rescuing Aristotle and the Church

Last night, we started watching Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey on DVD. Still waiting to finish Episode 1, the narrative has problems. The error in beatifying Giordano Bruno as a martyr to science was quickly pointed out by others. (See “Did Cosmos Pick the Wrong Hero?” by Corey S. Powell, Discover magazine online here and “Why Did Cosmos Focus on Giordano Bruno?” by Josh Rosenau at the National Center for Science Education here.) Part of that false narrative included a swipe at Aristotle which no one else caught. Aristotle always takes a lot of criticism, mostly by misunderstanding and misattribution. 

Reviewing Episode 6: Deeper and Deeper Still, (which is still in my future), Jennifer Ouellette of the LA Times wrote:

“Anyway, the notion of atoms dates back to an ancient Greek philosopher named Democritus, who first proposed that it just wasn’t possible to keep dividing matter into smaller and smaller bits; at some point, you would reach the smallest possible piece, which he dubbed “atomos” (“not to be cut”). His contemporaries, including Aristotle, didn’t take Democritus seriously, and why should they? They didn’t have the tools to probe such a small scale. But eventually modern physics proved him right.” ("Cosmos’ recap: Deeper and deeper still" April 14, 2014 5:20 AM here.)

First, the physical reality of atoms was doubted by serious scientists such as Ernst Mach as late as 1900. The concept was considered a convenient construct. The reality of very small particles was easy to accept because lenses and microscopes revealed them. However, the concept of “atom” raised unsolvable problems. Of course, those metaphysical objections go back to the Greeks. The problem was argued without resolution. 

What is between atoms? Nothing? “Nothing” is not a different kind of “something” but rather “nothing” truly “does not exist.” What then is between atoms? 

If nothing is between atoms, then why does it take any time at all for atoms go from one place to another? How do atoms interact across the void to form molecules? 

Nature abhors a vacuum. Every space must be filled with something.  If the void of nothing does not exist, and if all matter consists of uncuttable objects, how do we move at all?  

The clepsydra
from Cosmos (1980, page 179)

Obviously, we do move. Just as obviously, all matter is made of something, or perhaps four or five different kinds of something. The lack of a solution to such problems did not prevent social and material progress. And the atomic theory was supported by some evidence. Empedocles of Acragas used it to explain how the “clepsydra” worked. Ultimately, in the modern 19^th century, John Dalton, Dmitri Mendeleev, and others put the idea of the atom to good use.

That being so, the discovery of the electron and eventually other subatomic existents defeated the idea of an ultimately “uncuttable” object. Now, we have fields and statistical probabilities. 

 

Detail of Raphael's School at Athens. 

Plato points to the sky, while

Aristotle reaches for the world.

http://www.museivaticani.va/

Aristotle placed the Earth at the center of the universe for both logical and empirical reasons. A century later, Aristarchus of Samos put the sun at the center of our system. Archimedes attempted to settle question by measuring the parallax. He could not do it. He concluded that either the Earth is the center of the universe, or else the universe is far larger than anyone could imagine. We know now that the problem was his instrumentation. Fine as it was for the times, it was not up to the task. Friedrich Bessel achieved the first measurement of stellar parallax in 1838 using a spectroscope. Similarly, the rotation of the Earth on its axis was not proved by experiment until 1789 by Giovanni Battista Guglielmini and most dramatically demonstrated in 1851 by Léon Foucault. 

Aristotle’s embryology of the chick is one of the greatest experimental observations. He also knew that dolphins are mammals, breathing air, bearing their young alive and feeding them milk. 

In addition to being a careful observer, Aristotle attacked the philosophical (“scientific”) problems of his time by comparing and contrasting what others wrote before and then analyzing those against reason and fact. Even so, most of what we have from Aristotle was reconstructed. The great corpus of his original work was lost when the Macedonian royal family fought over his library and the scrolls were buried. Worms got to them. The damaged manuscripts were reconstructed with egregious errors. Other works from Aristotle’s students (primarily Theophrastus) were copied as if from Aristotle himself. 

The Catholic Church of the early Middle Ages found Platonism to its liking. In the 13^th century, Thomas Aquinas argued well for Aristotle. By the 16^th century—ten generations later—Aristotle was not just the norm, but literal truth. It was the method of men who sought literal truth in one book. We see this today when fundamentalist Christians attack Darwin. Darwin's Origin opens with citations to others before himself who proposed theories of evolution. But fundamentalists take one book as their source and therefore another single book as their target. 

The Catholic church of the Middle Ages was very supportive of astronomy in particular and science in general. Despite our modern focus on Christmas, for Christians the most important day of the calendar is Easter: the first Sunday, after the first full moon, after the first day of spring. Calculating Easter required bringing the solar and lunar calendars into agreement. They called the practice computas. It was a mathematical prediction tested by observation—thanks to the astrolabe imported from Islamic Spain in the late 11^th century. The churchmen of the Counter-Reformation would have been out of step with Catholic education of the 12^th century.

As Dr. Tyson says: “To make this journey, we’ll need imagination. But imagination alone is not enough because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than we can imagine. This adventure is made possible by generations of searchers strictly adhering to a simple set of rules: Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test. Reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence where it leads and question everything.”

It is a nice statement of the scientific method that works for television as it streams past you. Myself, to encapsulate the scientific method, I would have bulleted these points:

• Ask questions.
• Explain observations with logically consistent theories.
• Test theories with different observations and new predictions.
• Publicize your findings and your methods.

The rules can be variously stated. Those four mandates could be expanded to 14 steps. That is how truth works. It is why over 300 proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem have been published. 

As easy as it would be to excoriate Neil deGrasse Tyson, the series was written by Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter, both of whom worked on the original Cosmos: A Personal Journey with Carl Sagan. Druyan was married to Sagan. Sagan was one of Soter’s dissertation advisors. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Joy Hakim’s “Aristotle Leads the Way”

Science in the Middle Ages

The Scientific Method

Great Scientific Experiments 

Of Watches, Beaches, and Atheists