[troutman]

A Successor to Sagan Reboots ‘Cosmos’


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/sc...f=science&_r=1

The new “Cosmos” might be called the Large Hadron Collider of pop science: expensive, splashy and ambitious. After a series of special showings this week, including one at the White House, it will be shown in 170 countries and 45 languages, on Fox and on the National Geographic Channel — the largest global opening ever for a television series, according to Ann Druyan, Dr. Sagan’s widow and his collaborator on the original “Cosmos,” who is an executive producer and a writer and director of the new series.

The early reviews of the series are glowing, and an adoring profile of Dr. Tyson recently appeared in The New Yorker.

In the first episode, “Standing Up in the Universe,” we roam the streets of Rome as he recounts the story of Giordano Bruno, the philosopher who was burned at the stake in 1600 for professing the existence of an infinite number of worlds beyond our own. That was at the dawn of the scientific age, only a decade before Galileo looked through a telescope and saw that Bruno was right.

Much of the first episode consists of a tour of the solar system and then outward