Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Contrarian View: British Physicist Brian Cox is Either an Idiot or a Publicity Hound

The Internets is going agog over that dude dropping a bowling ball and a feather in a large vacuum chamber in order to show that Galileo's idea that objects accelerated by gravity fall independent of the object's mass:



In order to think that this is something special, you'd have to forget that the same experiment had already been done forty four years ago, on the surface of the Moon, by Astronaut David Scott during the Apollo 15 mission:



Yes, some photogenic Ph.D. reran the experiment for television, with better photography and inspiring background music. Big fucking deal.


11 comments:

  1. Of course, no "documentary" is worthy unless the narrator has an Australian or English accent!

    ReplyDelete
  2. BFD Indeed! But it will probably impress the grants committee.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, those of us who wear PJs and blog about crap from our mothers' basements might care a little bit. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I vote for publicity hound. So what. If it convinces even one mouth breathing cretin that this "science" stuff actually has some truth to it, it'll be worth it. Remember, mouth breathing cretins need things to be repeated for them. Over. And. Over. And. Over. Repetition might bore you and I, but we're not the intended audience because we have more brains than Jehovah gave a caterpillar.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm old enough to remember when Dave Scott made that lunar demonstration of Galileo's observation.

    I'm young enough to appreciate that Brian Cox came up with a fun, dramatic way to demonstrate that same 420 year old observation to a new audience.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Surely it is part of the scientific method that experiments can be repeated at any time by different people with the same result?

    Qod erat demonstratum :-)

    ReplyDelete
  7. The thing *I* want to know is who paid for this...pump time, facilities and personnel cost. I hope it was the BBC and not us taxpayers. Or maybe this is all we can do with science and facilities like these days. :(

    ReplyDelete
  8. Uhm, Stewart, BBC is taxpayer-funded. I don't get your point.

    ReplyDelete
  9. BBC is funded by an annual TV license fee, no?

    ReplyDelete

House Rules #1, #2 and #6 apply to all comments. Rule #3 also applies to political comments.

In short, don't be a jackass. THIS MEANS YOU!
If you never see your comments posted, see Rule #7.

All comments must be on point and address either the points raised in the blog post or points raised by commenters in response.
Any comments that drift off onto other topics are subject to deletion.

(Please don't feed the trolls.)

中國詞不評論,冒抹除的風險。僅英語。

COMMENT MODERATION IS IN EFFECT UFN. This means that if you are an insulting dick, nobody will ever see it.