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Disagree. Neil is an amazing speaker and educator on science. I'd say the best since Carl Sagan. Like Carl, I'd be willing to sit down and listen to him talk a
by drgath 15y ago
Disagree. Neil is an amazing speaker and educator on science. I'd say the best since Carl Sagan. Like Carl, I'd be willing to sit down and listen to him talk about anything he wanted, for hours and hours, with the same sense of wonder and inspiration.
If Carl was a poet, Neil is an orator. Here's a great example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o
Sure I'd love to have Carl back to do Cosmos II as well, but unfortunately that isn't possible.
- spottiness 15y agoI have mixed feelings about Neil. He certainly have the credentials and I like him, although he's never serious enough for me. I just watched the Youtube video that you pointed to, and there he sounds like a religious preacher. I found very weak points in his arguments, easily refutable. I hope that the sequel also targets a sophisticated audience: those of us that loved the original when we were kids and have continued evolving our brains for decades.
- hugh3 15y agoTo me, Neil always seems like he's talking to children. This is great for children. But as an adult who already knows 95% of what he's talking about it comes across as a bit grating. Carl Sagan could tell you what you already knew, and you'd still be happy to hear it, because he'd just remind you how awesome this stuff you already know actually is.
- rbanffy 15y ago> but unfortunately that isn't possible. You know information is never truly destroyed. Bringing Dr. Sagan back will probably remain too difficult for a couple generations, but, eventually, we'll figure that one out. And I can imagine the look on his face.
- geoffry 15y agoEven if you collected all the atoms that made up a person's brain, the most important information is lost. For starters, how would you know how those atoms were configured?
- rbanffy 15y agoThat's the information part. I really don't need his own atoms, just the precise pattern they were arranged on a given moment in time. Unless we can find differences between individual atoms of a given isotope, any atom of the right kind will do. Or, if we want to reconstruct just a digital model, we can forgo the atoms and run the simulation on the state representation. But, like I said, it's a problem to be solved by our smarter successors, not for us.
- sorbus 15y agoGiven sufficiently god-like technology, you could run a simulation of the entire world repeatedly, modifying variables until you get a world with a copy of Sagan who fits exactly all the historical information available with him. Something like this is implied to be happening towards the end of Stross's Accelerando, which I highly recommend (there's a free ebook edition). However, note my use of the term "god-like". Anything capable of doing this is so close to being a god that it makes very little difference from our point of view. There's also the theory that our universe is a simulation run by such an entity - the argument is something like "if it is possible to run a simulation of the universe, it is statistically far more likely that we're in such a simulation." Sort of makes sense, if you have the right mind-set or tilt your head and squint.
- lightcatcher 15y agoQuantum randomness. Hate to break it to you, but not happening.
- rbanffy 15y agoIs it really random or is it that we don't know how all the rules work?
- philwelch 15y agoYou know information is never truly destroyed. Information is always destroyed, and the universe uniformly has less net information now than it did a second ago; that's the second law of thermodynamics.