Origins Mini-Series Airs Tonight

SeaDour writes "The much-anticipated NOVA mini-series Origins begins tonight on PBS (check local listings for time). Hosted by Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, the ambitious show plans to journey all the way to the Big Bang and back again, "blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself." MSNBC has an interesting write-up on the show that's been four years in the making."

Comments

Balance

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully this series will have a little more balance than Cosmos did. I agree that Cosmos was a well-done series and that Sagan was (in general) a decent man, but I hope that the Origins series does not get political and kowtow to the liberal viewpoint on things such as Big Bang, macroevolution, etc. Especially in recent years, public opinion in this country has changed drastically as a result of a lot of new evidence that has come out. Evolution and Big Bang are not nearly as cut-and-dried as they used to be, and so I hope that there is at least some mention of intelligent design, which to most people in this country is far more plausible than sheer accident.

As a science nut I'm always glad to see good science programming. I would just like to see a little less politics and a bit more balance.

Feh...

[Pig Hogger]

Expect the southern baptists to raise hell about it...

Re:Should be a good night of television

[DAldredge]

Why do you assume that just because someone is religious they do not believe in evolution?

Re:Should be a good night of television

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's not just the "ultra religious" who have concerns about the feasibility of macroevolution resulting in the world as we know it."

yes, it's also the dumb non-religious people!

Re:Should be a good night of television

[jav1231]

Are you suggesting that the Theory of Evolution is more solid than electronics? Look, Evolution is a system of faith as most anything we do is. Equating "religion" and "faith" doesn't take away from what faith is. It's the conviction of the preponderance of evidence. People view evidence differently. Evolution is theory, plain and simple. That there is evidence to support it doesn't prove it. What the evidence does do for some is provide them with the faith (conviction) that it is probably what happened and that it best explains what happened.

Re:Ha ha ha, you see, because

[operagost]

How did a twelve-year-old boy get a low Slashdot id?

LOL!!!!!!111 GOD FARTED!!!111

Re: Should be a good night of television

[Txiasaeia]

From your link: "As they continued their investigation, Penzias and Wilson came to realize that they had stumbled onto the most conclusive evidence to date supporting the Big Bang Theory."

Doesn't exactly sound proven, does it? Evidence... support... theory... I'm bowled over here. Unless it's conclusively proven, it's a theory. End of story.

Re:Should be a good night of television

[daniel_newton]

No, what he said is that the tree decreases in entropy (a local decrease), but the heat reradiated into the environment increases the overall entropy in the entire universe.

So the universe has (for billions of years) been increasing in overall entropy... The universe was at a less entropic state when it was "created" then it is now?

That sounds like creation to me :)

Re:Just what does GWB believe in?

[Troed]

Umm. Iraq invaded Kuwait, after getting an OK from the USA, because Kuwait stole oil from Iraqi oilfields.

Yes, really.