"The Universe" on the History Channel
 

Did anybody else see the show? I'm sure they will repeat it. Great show, very informative. It brought me up to speed on where the current theory of the origin of the Universe stands and I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it. I plan to think on it then watch it again for more comprehension.

If you get a chance to watch it I recommend it. Sure beats the rest of what's on TV.

I think it's a series - this past weekend they had an episode that centered on Mars exploration including past & current missions and why they believe there are vast deposits of frozen water (ice) underneath the surface. Interesting stuff.

It actually got into a lot of the findings from the original 1970s Viking missions - which are often overlooked, but which were incredible successes.

think i caught the one ab black holes last night

It was a very interesting two-hour show, but, out of necessity a bit too brief. I would have been willing to have more info presented and expand the program to three-hours. :)

Is this about chicks? :D

That would be ho. You're always startin trouble. Hmm, ME an infidel!:D

Did anyone read the article on SlashDot.org where scientists now think that some dust in space might actually be _alive_?

link?

I think I caught the one on black holes. That's a pretty tough one to wrap one's mind around. I wish this stuff were required viewing in our schools, so kids would realize early on how small, insignificant and arrogant humans are. To think we're the one special place in the universe, when the Earth is nothing more than a microscopic particle, orbiting a grain of sand in a giant sandbox, surrounded by billions of other giant sandboxes, well, it's just incredibly arrogant.

There were some good episodes on Mega Disasters last night about a comet or asteroid hitting the Earth and how quickly it would wipe us all out. It's happened before and it will happen again. People seem to think all the changes the Earth has undergone were just to set things up for how comfortable we are now and that the changes are overwith. The computer animations on that show last night were just awe-inspiring.

The way I think of a black hole is simple:

It's just a massive object. So big, that its gravity draws everything (matter, light, radio waves) towards it past its singularity. It's "black" because no energy can reflect back to allow us to perceive it. It's not really a hole, but a lack of observable space.

Oh, but a black hole is so much more! They are only detectable by the accretion disk of gamma rays that appears on the event horizon, which is sort of the point of no return for matter entering the black hole. And what's more amazing is the process by which a dying star becomes a black hole, a white dwarf, a super nova or take your pick. To think there are billions of black holes out there when such a tiny percentage of dying stars become black holes, shows the true enormity of the universe.

caught a few minutes of it. nicely done for sure though i do miss a lot of the WWII productions that included a lot of period film. i find them on the 'other' H channels now.

History Channel is really one of the best things that ever happened to TV.

Truer words were never written.

I love astronomy and astrophysics. I saw the ("Universe") show on the Big Bang. Of course, none of the regular arguments for the existence of God are going to change anybody's decision, and this Big Bang thing doesn't have enough power either but.......

I'm imagining a Universe containing bazillions of galaxies each containing bazillions of stars with orbiting planets, and black holes and stuff.......all packed into a space that's smaller than the smallest subatomic particle........and I'm imagining someone contemplating that widely accepted finding about the universe's origin.......and not thinking maybe there is/was a God. Getting one's mind around black holes is easy compared to the Big Bang.

Exactly Sup... what triggered the whole big bang anyway, if all this stuff was so neatly packed. Something external act on it?

It was just the reversal of the Big Crunch. The previous universe's expansion ran out of steam, slowed and then reversed itself, pulling all matter back to a central point. Time went backwards and eventually, all matter was concentrated to infinite density. Then it exploded and started the universe we have now. It will eventually repeat itself.

Maybe.

More likely we'll never know.

Don't discount the presence of dark matter pulling us all back. We can't see it, but we can feel it. And Heisenberg says anything we can see is changed by the light we need to see it. So if it's truly dark, there's no telling what it'll do.

I think we all have agreed it a series, I know I have see a few of them... darn you guys I will now have to set my DVR to record the series.

Any of you guys seen the elegant universe with Stephan Hawking? I have the three DVD set.

I've seen most of the docs. on Hawking, but don't know if I've seen this one. Sad thing is that he's considered a bit fo a lightweight in the physics community. I guess that's what happens when you write books that lay folks can understand. He was probably a lot more highly thought of before A Brief History of Time. IIRC, he is credited with proving that black holes "emit" gamma rays.