Thursday, March 13, 2014

Take home message from the Cosmos: to the scientists: go out and recruit more scientist


The first episode of the TV series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”, was in part a tribute to Carl Sagan, the astrophysicist writer and presenter of the original “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”, and a reminder about the importance of mentoring the next generation of researchers. Moreover, it defines science as a community experience where the exchange of hypothesis and results between researchers is the driving force of knowledge evolution. The more curious minds we can attract to become scientists, the faster we will unravel the mysteries of the universe. After all, "vires in numeris", which means, "strength is in numbers".
As presenter of the new “Cosmos” series, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson repeatedly hallmarked the merits of science and the scientific method; science is powerful, Dr. Tyson argues, because it operates using empirically verifiable evidence. As he says,
“We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.”
Human existence and the survival of the future generation relies on the in-depth comprehension and understanding of the forces of nature. Dr. Tyson reminds us that our predecessors on earth were the earliest astronomers, to whom we owe the survival of the human race.
My favorite quote is: science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations, it’s the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher, a community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.
At the end "we are all made of star stuff" and we love big explosions on screen.

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