Hoping The Universe Ends Soon

I’m watch­ing the sec­ond episode of the His­to­ry Chan­nel series The Uni­verse and am get­ting aggra­vat­ed. I seri­ous­ly hope that the series improved over time. The nar­ra­tor’s voice is grat­ing on me and the qual­i­ty of sci­ence dis­played is poor. The writ­ers seem to have made their deci­sions based on dra­mat­ic impact rather than facts.

The sec­ond episode, about Mars, is bet­ter than the first episode, about the Sun. I had to roll my eyes when the nar­ra­tor intro­duced the Sun as «the largest star in our solar sys­tem,» only lat­er amend­ing the line by say­ing, «not only is it the largest star in the solar sys­tem, it is the only star in the solar sys­tem.» Yeah, thanks. But I almost stopped it and went to read a book when he described pho­tons as «glow­ing par­ti­cles.» So the pho­tons are emit­ting pho­tons? Some­one get me some pic­tures of those.

The descrip­tion of fusion at the heart of the Sun and the sub­se­quent dynam­ics of electron/photon exchange beneath the sur­face was nev­er­the­less enlight­en­ing, and I enjoyed the por­tray­al of the solar winds, even if the doom and gloom pre­dic­tions of solar radi­a­tion-fueled dis­as­ter (prob­a­bly com­ing in 2012) were a bit hysterical.

The Mars episode annoyed me most with a triv­ial detail: in com­par­ing the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed by the Viking Orbiter with that col­lect­ed by the Viking Lan­der, the show tells us that the media was all over the so-called «face on Mars» while the Viking Lan­der found noth­ing but bor­ing, dry rocks and «failed to make head­lines.» I remem­ber the head­lines, and what I think may have been the first col­or pho­to I ever saw on the cov­er of a news­pa­per, show­ing the pic­tures sent back by the lan­der. Land­ing a device on Mars that could send back pic­tures was big news, and I don’t recall the «face on Mars» ever mak­ing the news. I sup­pose I could have sim­ply missed it, but my rec­ol­lec­tion was great fan­fare and press atten­tion despite the dis­ap­point­ment in some cir­cles to have found a dry, rocky land­scape in those first pic­tures back from Mars. The suc­cess­ful touch­down of the Viking Lan­der cer­tain­ly did not fail to make headlines.

The series is now in its third sea­son and has received crit­i­cal acclaim. It’s been rec­om­mend­ed to me by peo­ple whose opin­ion I respect, so I’m guess­ing it has to have moved up in qual­i­ty. I can­not imag­ine any­one get­ting excit­ed about what I’ve seen so far. If noth­ing else, replac­ing the nar­ra­tor with some­one who does­n’t try to make every sen­tence sound like a movie trail­er («in a world where…») would go a long way toward dig­ni­fy­ing the material.