On the recommendation of Phil Plait, I’m watching a recording of Discovery’s “How the Universe Works” right now. It’s… a TV show.
That’s really the best way that I can describe it. I naively expected to see an interesting and informative documentary, and I shouldn’t have. This is science TV. The topics discussed are beyond the cognition of the typical viewer of even Discovery, and so they have to be distilled and simplified past the point of injustice, and then stylized with colorful CGI and exciting descriptions like, “an INCREDIBLE amount of energy,” and, “a billionth of a billionth of a billionth [I'm barely exaggerating here] of a billionth the size of an atom.”
It makes me think of this comic.
I get that shows like this have their place, and it’s good that anyone tries to get the mainstream interested in advanced physics, but it’s so hard for someone who understands this stuff (even at the severely basic level that I grasp it myself) to watch shows like this without tilting their heads and saying, “Eeehhhhh, all right, I guess that’s close enough,” every fifty seconds.
Oh Christ, they just talked about the mass-energy equation.
I love how you complain about how dumbed down the show is, but can’t come up with any examples, other than that they said “incredible amount of energy.” Seriously, that’s your problem with it? I don’t know, I think “billionth of a billionth of a billionth” is a pretty effective way to get across to the viewer the infinitesimal size of a particle; what should they have said instead? I follow astronomy and cosmology developments fairly avidly as a pure amateur. I certainly don’t have a strong physics background, but no more than the average person, and I find the show quite informative and well-made. I’d like to know what your ideal astronomy show would look like, assuming you don’t think it’s a big waste of time and energy trying to enlighten us idiots…