Richard Dawkins: Creationism at Giant's Causeway 'is intellectual baboonism'

Richard Dawkins: Creationism at Giant's Causeway 'is intellectual baboonism'
7 July 2012

The National Trust should not have buckled to pressure from the “intellectual baboons of young Earth creationism”, one of the world’s leading evolutionists has told the Belfast Telegraph.

Professor Richard Dawkins said it was regrettable that the trust had “paid lip service to the ignorant bigotry” of fundamentalists who believe the world is just 6,000 years old after references to creationism were included in the Giant's Causeway visitors' centre.

TV science broadcaster Professor Brian Cox also waded into the row. He said: “The National Trust should be ashamed of themselves. I don't mind creation stories presented as mythology, but to suggest there is any debate that Earth is 4.54 billion years old is pure s***.”

The trust’s move was hailed by the Caleb Foundation — an evangelical Protestant lobby group whose members believe in the literal truth of the Bible — which said the gesture “respects and acknowledges an alternative viewpoint” on the origins of the Earth.

While it claims to be non-party political, its chairman is Wallace Thompson, a former adviser to DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds. The vice chair is DUP MLA Mervyn Storey, who represents North Antrim, where the Causeway centre was built. Mr Thompson said Caleb had “worked closely with the National Trust over many months” to ensure the creationist position was included and it was very pleased with the results.

Prof Dawkins said that while the trust exhibit presents the scientific view of the Earth’s age, the charity had also “paid lip service to the ignorant bigotry of ‘young Earth creationism’, a view which flies in the face not only of science, but of theology too”.

“The age of the Earth is a matter of scientific fact, not opinion, and balance and fairness do not enter into matters of fact.

“The National Trust should not have given any consideration whatsoever to the intellectual baboons of young Earth creationism,” he said.

But the trust said it had merely acknowledged such views. A spokesman said: “We reflect, in a small part of the exhibition, that the Causeway played a role in the historic debate about the formation of the Earth, and that for some this debate continues today.“

Background

Creationist theories have sparked controversy here in the past. Two years ago the then Culture Minister Nelson McCausland called for museums to give more recognition to creationism after meeting Caleb Foundation lobbyists. Mr McCausland later asked for alternative views on the universe’s origins to be represented in museum exhibitions here. Belfaarst Telegraaph

H/T Eddie Izzard

Related: The (US) Photo Galleries of Volker Dierks


Give yourself a visual treat, the causeway photo I found at: Weird and Strange Wonders of the World

Sir Patrick Moore National Treasure 55 Years of The Sky at Night

 Update: Since the passing of Sir Patrick Moore, I can but make this post my eulogy to the man.

Those of you from foreign climes, may not have even heard of The Sky at Night, let alone know that it is the World's longest running television programme. But it is, celebrating next month in fact, fifty five years of continuous broadcasts, and all but one of those broadcasts, hosted by national treasure Sir Patrick Moore.

It was watching one such broadcast last night, that I was reminded of this Patrick Moore article that I had read in the Mail some short while ago. It is at this point, and not for the first time, every time in fact, every time I admit to having read something in the Mail I feel compelled to issue a disclaimer that I never have and never will, buy the Mail.

Which unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my younger sister, she being soo Daily Mail, that to have such a close family member catergorised as such, is not only excruciatingly embarrassing, it's also pretty damn sad. So on the rare occasion that I actually read an article in the Mail, it's only in passing and not by design.

Right so! having established my bona fides, let us move on.

Although Patrick shares his spot in the Mail's header, with young fellow me lad Brian Cox, OK he's forty four, but he doesn't bloody look it, and all things are relative you have to admit. And although the young Professor Cox is a national treasure in waiting, and I choose not to employ the word pretender as does the Mail, the man is anything but, the article in question is primarily about national treasure, Patrick Moore.

As we forgive other national treasures almost anything , the outrageous old queen Brian Sewell (watch) springing instantly to mind, so too must we forgive Sir Patrick, even if his peccadillos include the somewhat xenophobic philosophy of, the only good German is a dead German. Something I hope you too might forgive when you read the quite touching story behind Sir Patrick's reasoning.

I think what might be prudent before letting you loose on the article, is for me to now go and see if I can find a couple of short clips in order, that if you and Patrick are strangers, that you might get acquainted a tad beforehand.

Brian Cox? He's no astronomer! Patrick Moore turns his telescope on the young pretender - and concedes he's really rather good (for an ex-rock star)
By Jane Fryer
24 January 2012

Sir Patrick Moore is 88 years old and he looks it. His huge body is battered by age — lurid purple bruises decorate his enormous forearms, his baby-soft hands are clawed with arthritis, and an old wartime spinal injury has left him dependent on a rotating team of carers who share his fairytale 15th-century cottage in Selsey, West Sussex.

They help him from bed to chair and back again, glue his famous monocle (yes, really) to his eyelid to stop it tumbling out, launder his lurid Hawaiian shirts and fix him a daily G&T at 12.30pm, on the dot.

His enormous brain, however, is as sharp as ever and flits from his beloved cats Jeannie and Ptolemy ('they rule the house), to his loathing of all Germans ('if I saw the entire German nation sinking into the sea, I'd help push it down') and the national obsession with Professor Brian Cox — the pop star-turned-physicist who idolised Moore as a child, presented the 700th episode of Sky At Night with him last year, and is adored by the British public




Now, thanks to the BBC2 Stargazing Live show, Professor Cox has increased telescope sales by more than 500 per cent and is poised to take on Sir Patrick's mantle.

'These young ones come and they go, but he's a nice chap, you know,' barks Sir Patrick in his fabulously posh voice. 'Came on my show once. Can't say I've seen his, though. I've been so busy I keep forgetting. Sheer stupidity on my part. I think he and I could learn from each other.

'Though, of course, he's not an astronomer — he's a particle physicist!' he hurrumphs. 'And he was in a rock band! But I suppose the more people that come into astronomy the better. I'm all for it. And it's a good thing, because I'm ancient.'

So ancient, that he's planned his own death. In meticulous detail.

'I've got it all mapped out. I don't want a funeral. So they can take all my good bits and use them for medical science.'

What about the less 'good bits'?

'They can chuck it all away! I couldn't care less. But I've left some money in my will for a very good party. There will be a candle and a tape with a message from me, and they'll light the candle and play the tape, and at exactly the right moment I'll blow the candle out.'

And the message?

'I've already recorded it! I say: “I'll blow that candle out if it kills me”, ha ha ha!'

Goodness.

Sir Patrick may be cruelly incapacitated by a failing body, but it's hard to imagine his candle spluttering out any time soon. For one thing, he's too busy.




He's still filming The Sky At Night — the longest-running programme with the same presenter in the history of television ('I think we're on about instalment 760 . . . I can't see anyone beating it now, can you?') — recorded here in his cluttered study.

The first programme went out live on April 26, 1957, and he has missed just one since — in 2004, when he accidentally ate a rancid goose egg and nearly died of salmonella.

He has also just finished his Data Book of Astronomy — an enormous compendium of pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about the cosmos, which took him ten years ('so much has happened — the probing of the planets, huge advances in astronomy') and is now sitting glossily on his desk, topped by Jeannie the cat.


But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past

'I went to sleep one night about ten years ago and woke up like this,' he says, looking down in disgust at his crippled body. 'Look at my hands. I can't play the piano or the xylophone any more. It killed everything.' Including regular games of tennis, cricket (his unorthodox bowling style involving lots of leaps, bounds and whirling of arms), travelling and even walking.

'My active life came to an abrupt full stop. It was a tremendous shock and it was permanent. Unlike all those new telescope users out there, I can't even operate my telescope any more — I can't handle the controls. I try to make the best of it, but I could have done without the last ten years.' So he'd rather not have woken up that morning?

'It might have been better, yes,' he says. 'I'm not scared of dying. I believe in some form of afterlife: I just hope my uncle George isn't there — silly, bald-headed old coot. But you've got to make the best of things and that's what I've always tried to do.'

Patrick Alfred Cauldwell-Moore was born in Pinner, Middlesex, in 1923, only child of Charles, a soldier ('who survived the Great War with a Military Cross and a lungful of gas') and Gertrude, a trained opera singer.

He had a weak heart and so was tutored at home. In his spare time, he would lie on the sofa reading about the moon and the stars, and saved his pocket money until, aged 11, he had enough (£7 10s) to buy his first telescope and became the youngest member of the British Astronomical Association. Fifty years later to the day he was elected its president.

On the outbreak of World War II, he lied about his age (he was 16) and his dodgy heart and joined the RAF ('I knew if I joined the Army or Navy I'd last ten minutes with my heart').

Today he's rather tight-lipped about his war years, admitting only to spending five years as a navigator in RAF Bomber Command, losing all his teeth in an accident, sustaining the spinal injury that has finally caught up with him and, rather mysteriously, 'learning enough Norwegian to get by'.

With the war, though, came great personal tragedy.

'My girl, Lorna, was killed,' he says. 'We were both 20 and engaged. She was a nurse and she was in the wrong place when a German bomb fell. There was no question of anyone else — I still think about her all the time. Second best was no good for me. So I didn't marry and had no family.'

He lived with his beloved mother, Gertrude, until her death aged 94 in 1981 ('the worst day of my life after Lorna died'), became an amateur astronomer and travelled the world chasing eclipses, mapping the moon, reporting from meteorite craters for The Sky At Night and playing the xylophone on Morecambe And Wise.




'I never thought the programme would go on so long, but there are various reasons for it — it's cheap, it goes on late at night so it doesn't bother anybody, and it's not controversial. Though we had plenty of disasters.'

Like the time he swallowed a bluebottle live on air — 'it buzzed all the way down' — and his ten-minute interview in pidgin French with a Russian who spoke no English — 'we just about got away with it, ha ha!'

His high point was when he saw the dark side of the Moon for the first time after it was photographed from a space probe.

Nearly 760 Sky At Nights later, his letterbox is still overflowing with enthusiastic fan mail (they haven't all defected to Cox yet), which he answers in full — despite barely being able to type on his specially adapted computer keyboard — though he does now lean on a few stock replies for the bog-standard queries. 'You know . . . how do I take up astronomy? What's that bright thing in the sky? Is there life out there?'

And is there?

'I'm sure there is. I refuse to believe we're the only living things. But I can't prove it. The clue is maybe Mars — not little green men, or not any near here, anyway — but if we can find trace of any life on Mars, that will be our pointer.'

He is also a magnet for rather more eccentric correspondence — from the man convinced the Earth was shaped like a teacup, the women who wanted to send a carrier pigeon to the moon . . . He wrote back suggesting a parrot-pigeon hybrid, so it could say hello when it got there.




'There are plenty of nuts — the “flat-earthers” and “hollow-globers”,' he says. And he replies to every letter he receives, no matter how nutty.

Sir Patrick is surprisingly cheerful for a man whose physical life is restricted to his downstairs bedroom, wood-panelled study and a view through the mullioned windows at his cats playing on their very own scale model of Saturn in their luxury cat run. (He's paranoid about keeping them safe — there's a typewritten sign by the front door: 'Patrick's cats are fiendishly clever masters of escape. Please observe the airlock procedures'.)

'I used to wake up and think: “What have I got time for today?” Now, I get up, drink my usual four coffees, have a look at the obituaries in The Times, and if I'm not in them, I'll get on with the day's work.'

He is not a man afraid to speak his mind, whether it's regarding his own disabilities, or sharing some of his rather more, er, trenchant views.

There was an uproar two years ago when he said the BBC had been ruined by women executives drowning us in soap operas, cooking and quiz shows, and advocated two separate television stations — one for each gender. 'There should be a mix of men and women — that's what I actually said,' he insists (not very convincingly) today.

When I ask him about his comparing of EastEnders to diarrhoea, he smirks naughtily and says: 'I've never been a fan of soap operas.'

And don't, whatever you do, get him onto the Germans.

'Eughhh! A Kraut is a Kraut is a Kraut. And the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut.'

'Of course I'm a lot older than (Brian Cox),' he relents. 'In a fortnight's time I'll be 89! But I'm okay, just. Though I can't play cricket any more.'

Like many men of his generation, he is fervently anti-European (though he loves the Norwegians and the Greeks — 'the only people who fought gallantly all through the war'), is a keen member of UKIP ('if I were 20 years younger I'd be fighting for a seat next time') and frets about immigration.

'They need to be controlled. I'm not sure how, but let in the people you want and not the riff-raff,' he says. Perhaps it's time to change the subject, and ask if he wishes he'd made it to the moon himself. 'I had no chance,' he says, 'wrong age, wrong nationality and wrong medical grade.'

Yet he must take comfort in how many budding astronomers he has inspired and how much he has crammed into his 88 years.

He has mapped the moon (when the Russians and Americans went to the moon, they used his guides), played duets with Einstein ('exactly what I expected — charming, old-worldly, courteous and never wore socks'), excelled as a musician and composer ('one thing that is no credit to me is perfect pitch and perfect timing') and written more than 70 books on astronomy.

And he is surely one of the very few people to have met the first man to fly, Orville Wright, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

He's done an extraordinary amount in his 88 years. So would he feel happy to be passing on the stargazing baton to Professor Cox? 'I'm not dead yet!' Oh dear. 'Of course I'm a lot older than him,' he relents. 'In a fortnight's time I'll be 89! But I'm okay, just. Though I can't play cricket any more.'

And, er, Professor Cox? 'Well, he's not the only one taking on the mantle. But he is very good . . .'

That's high praise indeed from the great man.

And with that I leave him planning his next project — 'I think it's high time I started concentrating on my composing' — fussing over his beloved cats and rubbing his vast hands at the thought of all those budding astronomers with their shiny new telescopes — ('a wonderful thing').

Sir Patrick is an exceptional man and one whom, for all his outrageously un-PC views, it's impossible not to like enormously.

After all, there aren't many octogenarians who can wear a glued-on monocle and a lurid green Hawaiian shirt and still exude gravitas. Professor Brian Cox has some very large shoes to fill. The Wail

Brian Cox The Big Bang Machine

Not exactly fresh out of the starting blocks, but eminently watchable nonetheless.

Our Island Britain The Genesis - Iain Stewart - Brian Cox - Neil Oliver

Given that I'm about to head out the gap for the day, and just this minute reading Brian Cox's tweets, acting as a reminder, I thought it would do no harm to bring across from another blog, this previous post.


I have to say, if history and cosmology are your things, which they are mine, then these past twelve months or so, I can only describe as being golden. A mini-golden age of knowledge, learning, understanding, and not least entertaining with it.

And the reason for this little renaissance, is that we are blessed with three talking heads who know their respective trades well, but also know how to put a television series together, and put it together equally well I hasten to add.

Professor Iain Stewart, geologist, who among his many presentations recently gave us, Men of Rock.

The irrepressible, Professor Brian Cox, a super brain with a Mancunian accent, and whose shear enthusiasm for his chosen subjects, particle physics and cosmology, is simply infectious. Cox has produced a raft of stuff, and I was just about to say, for a young fellow me lad and tender years. But having just looked him up, the bugger is forty three, but what harm, he did bring us the hugely entertaining and informative, Wonders of the Universe, recently, inbetween that is, getting his freak on with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) . And something new from him coming shortly, as I was told in passing.

The assured archaeologist and historian, Neil Oliver, (home page) of Coast, A History of Scotland, now bringing us A History of Ancient Britain. Having watched the first episode myself on iplayer, (UK only I'm afraid) where, for what it's worth, I watch the little television that I do, free gratis and in my own time.


So here be the blurb. and a few clips of all three presenters chosen at random. Update: Not in the case of Iain Stewart, an absolute must watch if you have never seen the inside of the Naica Crystal Cave. And definitely not a random choice, the scrablands video. (Think Noah's flood and the Grand Canyon) Update: Now includes two short previews of a History of Ancient Britain.

The moment Britain became an island

Ancient Britain was a peninsula until a tsunami flooded its land-links to Europe some 8,000 years ago. Did that wave help shape the national character?

The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.

What had been a cold, dry tundra on the north-western edge of Europe grew warmer and wetter as the ice caps melted. The Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land, albeit land slowly being submerged as sea levels rose.

But it wasn't until 6,100BC that Britain broke free of mainland Europe for good, during the Mesolithic period - the Middle Stone Age.
Continue reading the main story
Find out more

It is thought a landslide in Norway triggered one of the biggest tsunamis ever recorded on Earth, when a landlocked sea in the Norwegian trench burst its banks.

The water struck the north-east of Britain with such force it travelled 40km inland, turning low-lying plains into what is now the North Sea, and marshlands to the south into the Channel. Britain became an island nation.

At the time it was home to a fragile and scattered population of about 5,000 hunter-gatherers, descended from the early humans who had followed migrating herds of mammoth and reindeer onto the jagged peninsula.

"The waves would have been maybe as much as 10m high," says geologist David Smith. "Anyone standing out on the mud flats at that time would have been dismembered. The speed [of the water] was just so great."

Relics of these pre-island times are being recovered from under the sea off the Isle of Wight, dating from when the Solent was dry land.

Grooved timbers preserved by the saltwater are thought to be the remains of 8,000-year-old log boats, and point to the site once being a sizable boat-building yard, says Garry Momber, of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology (see video clip below).

The tsunami was a watershed in our history, says archaeologist Neil Oliver, presenter of BBC Two's A History of Ancient Britain.

"The people living in the land that would become Britain had become different. They'd been made different. And at the same time, they'd been made a wee bit special as well." More, pics and a clip.

Brian Cox on Cern's Baffling Light-Speed Find

Update:

BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results
by Edwin Cartlidge
22 February 2012

It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.

Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis. sciencemag.org

Brian Cox on Cern's Baffling Light-Speed Find

Puzzling results from Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have confounded physicists - because it seems subatomic particles have beaten the speed of light.

Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km (454 miles) away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.

Physicist Brian Cox talks to Shaun Keaveny on BBC 6 Music about this baffling find - he says that if it is right, it could require a complete rewriting of our understanding of the laws of the Universe. listen and more

Brian Cox The Big Bang Machine

I captured this recent BBC repeat with the view to uploading it to Rapidshare, but a check on Youtube came up with the program.

I can't honestly say with which I was the most awestruck, the minds of those involved in the experiment or the size and complexity (and beauty) of apparatus itself.

Just one of the data facts given in the program that stuck with me, was the speed to which particles would be accelerated. Just short of the speed of light, or to put it in context relative to the collider itself, particles would travel around the 27 kilometre circumference, 11,000 times a second.

Lots of information here at CERNS LHC homepage, but do check out the other sections in the sidebar. It is, at the risk of repeating myself, awesome.

Somewhere in the archives I have an elusive post with a link to the Boston Globe's superb collection of LHC photographs. No matter, here is a direct link to that set, and to a later set here.

H/T Striden12 for the upload.

Cern's Youtube channel.

BBC: Professor Brian Cox visits Geneva to take a look around Cern's Large Hadron Collider before this vast, 27km long machine is sealed off and a simulation experiment begins to try and create the conditions that existed just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Cox joins the scientists who hope that the LHC will change our understanding of the early universe and solve some of its mysteries.

A short time lapse film showing construction of the LHC.

The Arrow of Time

This may come across as a funny kind of post, not least because it started out as an observation on the future of America but has ended up as much about Professor Brian Cox as it has about about the doomed United States of America.

Why the focus Brian Cox then? Perhaps because he is infinitely more interesting than the alternative, the inevitable demise of the United States as a functioning society, and when it finally goes broke, as the world's number one super power.

For the life of me, I couldn't remember the law of physics that Cox had quoted recently in one of his Wonders of the Universe programs. However, after a mighty search, and gathering much Brian Cox material on the way, I managed to come up trumps. Not only finding the reference that I wanted, but two clips that were custom made as it were.

Although they apply to all things and all nations, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Arrow of Time, I thought particularly applicable to the situation in America.

All of its own making, and heading as it is, lemming like towards the precipice, the United States of America is, just like the proverbial lemming, doomed.

One only has to read the article below to realise this, there is no hope for America because there is no saviour for her. It's certainly not another five years of the failed Obama that will reverse the decline, nor is it the batshit crazies of the Republican Party, and it's certainly not going to be Jesus, no matter how much prayin' is done by the ultra batshit hucksters of the South.

I don't know if I would have ever posted on this AlterNet article, had it not been for a Bill Maher clip. Mahers clip wasn't in reply to the article, but it could just has well have. In fact, as outlandish as Maher's clip is, it's almost a tailor made response to the crazies. And by virtue, that is the frightening thing about it.

6 Reasons the Tea Party Is More Dangerous Than McCarthyism

The Tea Party rebellion brings together six major political and economic trends of the last 20 years that are distinct from the anticommunism powering the McCarthy age.
August 4, 2011 |

The power of the Tea Partiers, who refused to raise the US government's debt ceiling this past week despite the pleading of Republican pundits and the powerful, echoes the 1950s when Sen. Joe McCarthy, Fighting Joe, went after those who thought themselves his masters.

It's true; the right-wing lobbies Club for Growth and FreedomWorks both cheered on the 25 or so Tea Partiers who sabotaged an already reactionary bill from passing in the House.

Conservative journalists tell us South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint flexed his Tea Party cred and convinced the South Carolina House delegation to buck House Leader John Boehner and his bill.

But all of this strum and drang had other bankrollers of the Tea Party takeover like the US Chamber of Commerce unhappy. A House aide described the Tea Party freshman as "buckets of crazy" to conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.

All this reminds me of 1952. more

A picture paints a thousand words.

eta:

America In Decline

By Noam Chomsky

August 06, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --“It is a common theme” that the United States, which “only a few years ago was hailed to stride the world as a colossus with unparalleled power and unmatched appeal is in decline, ominously facing the prospect of its final decay,” Giacomo Chiozza writes in the current Political Science Quarterly.

The theme is indeed widely believed. And with some reason, though a number of qualifications are in order. To start with, the decline has proceeded since the high point of U.S. power after World War II, and the remarkable triumphalism of the post-Gulf War '90s was mostly self-delusion.

Another common theme, at least among those who are not willfully blind, is that American decline is in no small measure self-inflicted. The comic opera in Washington this summer, which disgusts the country and bewilders the world, may have no analogue in the annals of parliamentary democracy. more

Have a piece of Bill Maher and then we can apply the Arrow of Time and the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the situation in the US, (or universally) courtesy of Brian Cox.

''The arrow of time dictates that as each moment passes things change, and once these changes have happened, they are never undone.''

Now the program below wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea, it's ninety minutes long for one thing, just as Brian Cox isn't everybody's favourite beverage, but I might be inclined to put that down to a touch of the green eyed. Nevertheless I thoroughly enjoyed this Professor Al-Khalili (Jim meets) Brian Cox.

Update: Not any more I don't.

Learning as I did along the way, among other things of course, that Coxy, by his own admission, has a foul mouth on him. Which is always nice to know, having a bit of a gob on me myself.





That gob, his not mine, confirmed in this very readable article from the Telegraph. Only unlike the Telegraph, sans censorship.

Brian Cox: 'I'm not anti-religion. I'm anti-maniac'

....He also has an infectious enthusiasm for his subject, an impression compounded by a quirk of his physiognomy: he always seems to be smiling as he talks. There is a wonderful spoof of him on YouTube. It uses footage from Wonders of the Solar System, the critically acclaimed series he made for the BBC last year. It shows him looking up into the night sky and musing: “Sometimes I look at the stars and I wonder: what the fuck is going on?”

Has he seen it? “Yeah, and actually that is not far from the truth. You should see some of the out-takes from our new series. They have one out-takes film which is just me swearing. Five minutes. It would be great to get it out there, but the BBC will never allow it.”

He does have a reputation for plain speaking. The Creationist belief that the world is 6,000 years old is dismissed as “bollocks”, anyone who believes the world is going to end next year because of the Mayan calendar is “a moron”. And people who believe Cern’s Large Hadron Collider will suck the universe into a black hole are “twats”. more

Outside The UK? I Have a Treat For You: Brian Cox Wonders of the Universe

Let me rephrase that, I have a treat for you courtesy of iplayerrips, gawd bless 'im.

I have just been catching up on iplayer, the latest episode (4) of Brian Cox's second masterpiece series, Wonders of the Universe. Going in search of a decent trailer or two, in order to give you taste, I hardly expected to find the thing ripped and upped. So here is part one episode one, the rest available on Youtube.

Episode two I found particularly enthralling, going so far as to say, that I learnt more about the Universe in those sixty minutes than I have in the last sixty years. The facts and figures given out were simply mind blowing. Can you conceive a Red Giant, Beetle Juice, so colossal that our entire solar system would fit within? A Red Giant I add, that could quite easily go Super Nova tomorrow. Now wouldn't that be a nice event to witness in one's lifetime?

Enjoy,



Program details, but I won't hotlink it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00zf9dh/Wonders_of_the_Universe_Destiny/

But I wouldn't be, being myself, if I didn't bring you five minutes from the other side.



Crossposted.