Neil Degrasse Tyson does Cosmos

faethor said:
Perhaps that group will step up and take some responsibility and admit that using fallacies doesn't help them?
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To paraphrase the Scottish First Minister:
Loch Strachan will have evaporated and the surrounding mountains melted in the heat of the expanding sun before that happens.
 
and if the anti-science crowd really cared about reality they would be on this instead of getting bent out of shape because of a mild miss-comment about that moron bush.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Math is one of the tools used to test models. It is not physics. Physics is physics. Math is both of tool of physics and something that makes physics practically useful. You can understand many things in physics without math. Your brain can solve many kinetics and dynamics problems without a single equation.
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Physics without Math :

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Calculus and differential equations are the language of Physics, if you don't understand the math, you're not going to solve many kinetics or dynamics problems
 
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faethor said:
Awesome! It's good to see that when a problem is pointed out the guy takes some responsibility.
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Tyson insisted that he was correct in his account of what Bush said and the context in which Bush said it. Given all of the scientific research on the fallibility of human memory, I would have thought Tyson would be a bit more circumspect

What is really so “mysterious” is why Tyson found it so difficult to confess error and pretended that Bush’s 2003 remarks were only just-now discovered. Sean Davis had pointed to the 2003 quote as the source from the beginning. Since Tyson now admits that the source of the quote is Bush's 2003 speech on the Challenger disaster, making Tyson's claims about it and its significance is false. Tyson regularly repeated a false account in order to cast aspersions on another person.

Tyson finally apologizes:
Partial Anatomy of My Public Talks
And I here publicly apologize to the President for casting his quote in the context of contrasting religions rather than as a poetic reference to the lost souls of Columbia. I have no excuse for this, other than both events-- so close to one another -- upset me greatly. In retrospect, I’m surprised I remembered any details from either of them.
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But instead, I will be the one contrasting what actually happened in the world with what the Bible says: The Arabs named the stars, not Yahweh.
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:rolleyes:
 
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What a maroon!

the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, ... named the visible stars.

Civilizations from before the rise of Islam

The Greco-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy cataloged the known stars in a book, by name, position and brightness in the 2nd century. Ptolemy's book was translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th centuries and became known in Europe as a 12th-century Latin translation from the Arabic copy of Ptolemy's book.
 
metalman said:
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The Greco-Egyptian astronomer Claudius Ptolemy cataloged the known stars in a book, by name, position and brightness in the 2nd century.
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Apparently the Greeks weren't much into naming them, named a few but mostly described the constellations they belonged to and their relative positions.

Ptolemy's book was translated into Arabic in the 8th and 9th centuries and became known in Europe as a 12th-century Latin translation from the Arabic copy of Ptolemy's book.
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Even if the first thing above was not accurate, it remains true that very many of our star names derive from the Arabic descriptions of the stars as translated from Ptolemy's book.

Perhaps it is most accurate to say that we named the stars by taking the Arabic descriptions as names.
 
metalman said:
Calculus and differential equations are the language of Physics, if you don't understand the math, you're not going to solve many kinetics or dynamics problems
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If you don't understand the physics you won't know what the maths means.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Even if the first thing above was not accurate, it remains true that very many of our star names derive from the Arabic descriptions of the stars as translated from Ptolemy's book.

Perhaps it is most accurate to say that we named the stars by taking the Arabic descriptions as names.
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Many ancient cultures have named stars. The Chinese were far better astronomers than the Arabs. The Aztecs were decent at it. Hindu, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian science was the primary source of much of the Arab science of the so-called Golden Age of Islam. And the Jews, whose scripture is being misquoted by Tyson, were also decent astronomers.

However Tyson says in his talk that the Arabs literally "named the stars".


rather than that the star names derive from a game of broken telephone played from Egypt to Babylon to Greece to India to Arabia to Europe which led to Arab star names being used in the West.

and "Arabic Numerals" and "Algebra" and the concept of "zero" came from the Hindu's by way of Islam

another bit of science history Tyson gets wrong.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
If you don't understand the physics you won't know what the maths means.
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Newton invented Calculus ( fluxions and fluents ) to understand physics, once he understood it using Calculus, he then used Algebraic equations in his published papers on physics, Newton kept his fluxions and fluents methods a secret for 20 years, until after Leibniz independently discovered and published a paper on Calculus. Once others read Leibniz 1696 paper on Calculus, it was recognized that Newton's Principia of 1687 was all about calculus relationships
 
metalman said:
and "Arabic Numerals" and "Algebra" and the concept of "zero" came from the Hindu's by way of Islam

another bit of science history Tyson gets wrong.
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You're quite good at nitpicking really, aren't you. We use ARABIC numerals (the glyphs deriving from Arabic) because that's how the Muslims represented the Indian system. We derive our representation from theirs because ... they used it. While we were having our dark ages they were preserving the ancient sciences and building on them. When our time came we got our stuff though them because they had it. Fractional notation? Decimal point? Not Indian.

I suppose when our civilization collapses and others come to pick the corpse they can argue about whether the west had science or whether it was all stolen from the Greeks, the Indians and the Persians.

And the Jews? Sorry, they a) were Hebrew or something like it back then (rather than people of Judea which where we get the more modern usage from) and b) no they weren't astronomers. There is nothing of merit in that field that has come from Hebrew astronomy and that shouldn't be surprising considering their small numbers and their mostly pastoral lives. They weren't a major civilization in the area and the settlements were relatively small and the united kingdom only lasted about a hundred years. Their story books became amazingly influential over following centuries and that is undeniable - but their astronomy? No. They could do calendars but they weren't really interested in stars and planets.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
You're quite good at nitpicking really, aren't you. We use ARABIC numerals (the glyphs deriving from Arabic) because that's how the Muslims represented the Indian system. We derive our representation from theirs because ... they used it. While we were having our dark ages they were preserving the ancient sciences and building on them. When our time came we got our stuff though them because they had it. Fractional notation? Decimal point? Not Indian.
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The Arabs replaced the Hindu glyphs with new ones, now knows as "Arabic Numerals"

The Hindu's came up with Zero as a number

Algebra has roots from the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, & Hindu's

The Hindu's had computed a Sine table in the 5th century

Āryabhaṭa's sine table

If you listen to Tyson's lecture, he gives all credit for Algebra and Arabic Numerals to the Muslims, which is wrong
 
Programmers the world over, all slapping their foreheads in shame.
"That's all we had to do!"


https://twitter.com/x/status/551378648578916353

Problem Solved!!

its not the programmer that causes the problems, its the "users" ;)

if you want an infallible computer system, you must limit users to "The Pope"


https://twitter.com/x/status/551379957348581376

Q ?
Which one is the "scientist" and which one is the "new age guru" ?

Analog systems were not very hackable, but they also had some undesirable "features"
 
Q ?
Which one is the "scientist" and which one is the "new age guru" ?
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The door can always be opened by the one who closes it. ... Right?

Neil is obviously an American living in the USA because otherwise he would see that the real problem is that the US authorizes sanctions against those it doesn't like even when the evidence is too weak to support it. Any excuse for policy.

Still likely that there was a big insider component to this "hack".
 
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