MASS

Episode 10 The Edge of Forever

There are some great galaxy pictures in this episode especially considering that the corrected Hubble Telescope was more than a decade away.

I thought the flatland segment was way overdone and I never heard of the tesseract which is a 4-dimensional cube. I guess a lot of this discussion was the precursor to string theory and its additional dimensions.

The current theory on the universe is that it has just the necessary amount of mass to be flat with only a .4% margin of error. If the universe had more matter it would have curvature of a sphere and less matter would create a saddle shape.

Carl has really done his analysis of various cultures. I find it amazing that the Hindu religion has Brahma cycles that last 8.6 billion years.

Another amazing fact is that all the energy intercepted by all radio telescopes from non solar system objects would not equal the energy of a single snowflake hitting the ground.

The last fact is hard to visualize. When you think of the arms of a spiral galaxy rotating, it is not a constant group of stars comprising the arm. The arm is actually defined by a density wave that creates new stars at the leading edges of the arms. The sun as it rotates around the Milky Way actually goes in and out of the spiral arms. The sun is traveling at 486,000 mph so that it can make one galactic revolution in 240 million years.

Carl did a great job of bringing his own perspective to this cosmology episode. I'm really looking forward to Neil De Grasse Tyson's handling of this material in the 2014 version of Cosmos.