Interesting Popular Science Shows

I am intrigued by some of the programming I get on television, especially the shows on The Science Channel, Discovery, and The History Channel that deal with matters such as the Big Bang Theory of cosmology and the often cataclysmic history of the Earth. The other night I was treated to a series of shows about these topics, much to my delight.

On the Science Channel, I witnessed the continuing rise of a charismatic young science/educator: the University of Manchester's physicist Dr. Brian Cox. Dr. Cox quickly hits the viewer with his overwhelmingly happy, smiling persona and then infects with his enthusiasm for scientific discovery and the scientific process. His specialty seems to be in the area of subatomic particles and how to (1) reconcile their behavior with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity into a comprehensive theory of "everything" and (2) discovering more about the nature of the Big Bang by creating an environment similar to that which occurred soon after that event. With the new Hadron Supercollider near Geneva, Switzerland, Cox, along with many of his colleagues, have designed experiments that should either answer many of their questions or open up many new areas of inquiry. I am looking forward to more appearances by this bright, energetic and talented young scientist.

As for the Earth, it is amazing to me how the scientific method has discovered so many incredible events that happened in our planet's unwritten history:

--The creation of the Moon from an early collision with the Earth of a planetoid-type object, and how that object's iron eventually comprised the Earth's core.

--That the overwhelming majority of the Moon's (and implicitly the Earth's) craters occurred at about the same time 3.9 billion years ago, due to Jupiter and Saturn coming so close to one another that the change of gravitational pull on the asteroids released many of them to the inner part of the solar system.

--About 650 million years ago, the Earth went into a deep freeze "snowball" period that came close to extinguishing what life there was; volcanic activity eventually melted the ice and brought up temperatures.

--Earth's high oxygen content in its atmosphere is almost entirely due to microscopic algae-like organisms that converted sunlight into oxygen on a mass scale about 500 million years ago. And they can still be found in Earth on the west coast of Australia in the form of their rock deposits known as stromatolites.

--At about 250 million years ago, more than 90% of all marine species and over 70% of all land species were exterminated when a large section of the Earth's molten mantle rose to the surface in the form of massive volcanic formations and eruptions, covering the planet with ash (known as the Permian Extinction). [Wikipedia does offer other possible scientific explanations for this mass extinction.]

--More recently, in North America the mega-mammals (the mammoths and mastodons), along with the Neolithic human society known as the Clovis, were wiped out when an asteroid/meteor hit in what is now the Chesapeake Bay region, superheating the air, causing massive fires, and choking off sunlight.

And I've left out quite a bit (the dinosaur extinction is "old hat" to me). But it's all very fascinating to me. And it makes me sad to know that so many young people are being deprived of these great wonders which true science is revealing because of a narrow fundamentalist religious doctrine that insists on a 6,000 year old universe!