Yesterday evening, I saw the first episode of the Neil deGrasse Tyson reboot of the old Carl Sagan series Cosmos. It proved to be excellent.
The first episode had a few faults: The visual effects were perhaps overdone---apparently, it was necessary to have everything (galaxies etc) in swirling, kinetic motion, with no indication of the compression of time involved (the Milky Way galaxy does rotate, but only once in every 200 million years). The one real false note was the incredibly crowded asteroid belt, an image that owes a lot more to The Empire Strikes Back than it does to reality. But often, the visual effects were terrific and unexpected, as when they showed an artistic representation of a stormy Great Red Spot on Jupiter, viewed from inside the Spot. The animated sequence---showing poor Giordano Bruno and his terrible fate---was very affecting. (However, I did laugh afterwards at the Phil Plait @BadAstronomer observation that Bruno looked like George Harrison as drawn by Peter Maxx.)
But what made the show so special weren't the visual effects, superb as these often were. It was that Tyson managed to capture and update much of the spirit of the original show---above all, the sense of wonder for science and the zealous defense of science. As did Sagan, Tyson was very clear and direct in describing how religious and civil authorities suppressed freedom of thought and scientific inquiry as a threat to the religious establishment, using the story of Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600 for (among other things) asserting that stars are other suns with planets of their own. (I can imagine that some will complain that Tyson is furthering an unfair "conflict" narrative between science and religion; there is some truth to this complaint, but as shown by Tyson it is abundantly clear that in Bruno's time Protestants as well as the Catholics used the most severe punishments against their opponents, including free thinkers such as Bruno.) Tyson summarized the spirit of science early in the episode: "Follow the evidence wherever it leads, question everything, and the cosmos will be yours!"
One beautiful aspect of the newCosmos was how they honored Sagan. Tyson began the episode as did Sagan began his first episode, standing on rocks on the California coast above the ocean; he invoked the memory of Sagan through several brief clips of his voice and photographs. Much of the episode of course paralleled the original, including a dramatic "cosmic year" compressing the entire age of the universe into one calendar year (e.g., human civilization began 15 seconds before midnight on December 31). Tyson repeated Sagan's affirmation that we are all "star stuff" (our world was formed from the material produced in supernovae). But the last several minutes of the episode were especially poignant, as Tyson showed the actual day planner of Sagan from 1975 showing his appointment with Sagan (Tyson traveled to Cornell to meet Sagan, who hoped to recruit him as a college student). Tyson also described Sagan's accomplishments as a scientist (for example, Sagan predicted that Saturn's moon Titan would have methane lakes, something that has since been verified). Tyson reminded the viewers that Sagan's prediction in the original series that we would discover planets around other stars has indeed come true.
I am glad that Cosmos has proved to be so good, capturing the spirit of the original series so well. The original show affected me deeply, and I know it affected some of my friends deeply as well. I am looking forward to seeing the rest of the series, and I hope it has as much as an effect on young people today as the original show did on me and my friends.