Watch an episode of 'Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey' with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and comment below about what you learned, noting the title of the episode. If you watch the first episode of the series, discuss what you could use from the program, specifically, in your "Evolution of Life During the Phanerozoic" iBook pages.
A Sky Full of Ghosts: Episode 4
ReplyDeleteIn this episode, the ideas of gravity, space, and time are discussed. The topics presented in the episode that stood out to me were black holes and spacetime. Black holes simply blow my mind. The idea that no one knows what occurs to things that travel beyond the event horizon of these spatial phenomena, to me, is both a frightening and exciting fact. To think that entire universes could be housed within those tiny, ridiculously strong singularities at the center of black holes overwhelms my mind. What kinds of worlds are going undiscovered because the inability of humans to travel to and pass through black holes? This idea causes me to ponder the prospects of the future. Will the human race ever be able to unravel these mysteries of space? And if so, what will they discover? Through this episode I learned a considerable amount more about black holes, the specifics concerning their makeup and their discovery, and was forced to consider what could possibly be held on the other side, past the event horizon and through the center of these gravitational wonders. In talking about black holes, the episode discussed the concept of spacetime and it’s many complexities. I learned how spacetime can be warped, expanded and contracted according to no standard set of rules. For instance, through a black hole, spacetime is completely altered and the entire universe is seen in a completely new light. Black holes completely alter spacetime. The whole idea about spacetime that it does not remain constant, not just simply in the context of black holes. We on Earth are continually subjected to this inconsistency. It’s a scary thought, that there is no standard for time (everything is relative), and still I do not understand all the implications of this idea. The whole concept is beyond me. By watching this episode my mind was stretched to the limits as I was forced to consider ideas that were completely beyond my capacity of thought. The things taught to me about black holes and spacetime made an impact on my mind as I was taken a step further to realizing the secrets of our universe.
In the episode titled When Knowledge Conquered Fear it is revealed how proving that gravity exists helped people understand their world, and not to fear what can't be explained. With the help of Edmond Halley Isaac Newton was able to publish his work on gravity and other laws of physics. His publication the Principia Mathematica proved that the gravitational pull of the sun and the planets cause celestial bodies to circle the sun in an elliptical pattern. This gravitational influence on objects in the Oort Cloud is what causes comets to occasionally travel near Earth, as the gravity from a near by star knocks the comet out of the Oort Cloud and sends it hurtling toward the sun where the planets then direct it toward Earth. Before people thought that comets were messengers of doom, but now thanks to the Law of Gravity we see comets as another wonder of our universe.
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