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Cosmos, still relevant and entertaining almost 30 years on
Date of Review: Jun 26, 2009
The Bottom Line: I recommend this series without reservation. Dr. Sagan's style makes the information more interesting than the subjects tend to get from other sources.
I think I was on one of my regular trips to DC to visit friends, probably 2004. I ve been so many times that I only have one Mall Day to see if there is a new exhibit at a museum while I trek from the East Wing of the National Museum to the Lincoln Memorial the rest of the time is spent with friends as if I were visiting any other city. During this trip, I went into the Air and Space Museum for the first time In over 20 years. What was ultra-cool at 12 was Battlestar Gallactica lunchbox campy at 35.
With this campy mindset, I decided to watch Carl Sagan s Cosmos. The campy expectation was quickly kyboshed.
I watched the series when originally broadcast in 1980, but what I remember is not even close to what I recently finished.
Cosmos is three things at once: a scientific tale whose general information remains correct, a piece of socio-history explaining the worries of its time, and the personal journey the series purports to be.
The other aspects of the series are integral but Cosmos is primarily a scientific series focusing largely on astronomy and on our immediate solar system and on the men who discovered, mapped, and altered our understanding of how our universe looks and works. Dr. Sagan brings a professorial joy to these subjects in a way that engages without being condescending. Cosmos is a so-called astronomy for poets university level class whose lecturer is so truly excited by his subject that he can make his exploration work for poet and pro-am and most other strips between and beyond.
His explanation of billions and billions of years or miles or particles is not so agoraphobic as they might be otherwise (at least to my brain easily overwhelmed by extremely large and extremely small numbers). This awareness of his audience carries into making the sometimes very obtuse history accessible. We tend to forget, if we ever knew, that the Pythagoreans were a religious group, not just a klatch of geometers. Dr. Sagan explains their almost alien notions along with the quasi-religion that Johannes Kepler believed as he developed his explanation of planetary motion. This is the same mechanism he uses to go from the Huygens s telescope experiments to the telescope and prism combination Hubble used to prove that the universe is not static. He also brings his take on explaining the vagaries and esoteric constructs of Special and General relativity.
He mixes all of this with art and culture contemporaneous to his historical subjects and to the contemporary culture at the time of production. He goes back to his neighborhood in Brooklyn and gives a lecture at a middle school there. Here and the final episode where he shows the better parts of human nature from all over the globe are when the beauty of the infinite above and beyond meshes with the quotidian but significant lives of people of our time. Cosmos stays dream-like but grounded, exploratory but safe.
Cosmos is also a time-capsule for its place in history. The series was aired in 1980. From concept to finished product, the series went from the end of Watergate (1974) to the beginnings of the Iran Hostage Crisis (1979) and was aired well into the more than year long Iran Hostage Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. So it was made and aired during one of the reheats of the Cold War.
Dr. Sagan makes reference to nuclear war (annihilation), to Cold War, and to the lament about how much money nations spend on weapons and defense compared to the tiny amount given to science.
He also made reference to global warming and man s responsibility at a time when this idea was in its infancy and the science on it fuzzy at best.
About half of the 13 episodes have updates made in 1990. Much changed from the original production to the re-release. Here is the only weak spot for me. In the decade since it aired, Dr. Sagan became a bit more fervent in h is beliefs about world politics and climate change. His opinions were well informed, but they lacked the level headed way that the earlier Sagan used during the original production. In every case, these updates were distracting.
The scientific info in Cosmos will not become quaint. Cosmos will also not become culturally retro because of the eye the series casts at its time and responsibility.
For Dr. Sagan, Cosmos is a personal journey where he creates a spaceship of the imagination to wander about a virtual reality of the local solar system and to the broader galaxy. His movements around this geometrical oddity with angelic lighting are silly.
He also has little use for the word theory. He explains the scientific method where a perceived law of science is maintained only so long as it is relevant. The law will either change or be entirely replaced if the new information is predictable and repeatable. The best example for this is that Newton s laws of gravity were augmented when Einstein proved his own.
He used his authority and confidence to call evolution fact and pretty much drop the theory from Einstein s conclusions about light, energy, mass, and relativity. I find it funny that he would run into far more trouble today making those pronouncements than he would have at the time from religious and cultural groups less certain of these ideas not all forward motion is progress.
For those familiar but have not see it in a while, it is well worth a second look. If you have even the smallest interest in anything mentioned here and other reviews, then start with this series.
I recommend it without reservation.
