If you've ever tutored a prescient child, How the Universe Works is a series for you. It does so well until it starts tripping all over itself, revealing that it just doesn't get it on the the most basic of levels.
In particular, this episode, Did a Black Hole..., comes frustratingly close to how the first stars and galaxies were formed and then completely misses everything.
Way back at the beginning there was total darkness within which massive clouds of hydrogen and helium ions began to coalesce as the first star nurseries with one little quirk: within each cloud the first structure to emerge was as super-massive black hole whose creation sent shock waves reeling through the cloud, igniting the first stars which then began to organize themselves around that black hole as the earliest of spiral galaxies. This model is simplicity in itself and it takes only a little reasoning to understand that the super-massive black hole had to come first. The cloud's center, its densest area, would mature much, much faster than the smaller, isolated pockets of local densities destined to become stars.
And it is this model that this episode keeps dancing around, seeming to get it and then drawing back, getting it and then drawing back. In fact, as it progresses the closer it comes to this model without really getting there - wandering off the point, eventually babbling about colliding galaxies (us and Andromeda) and then a short coda about the End: all the stars burning out and nothing left but ashes and lonely black holes.
The Key point here is that this episode and most of the others cannot seem to stick to a single line of reasoning long enough to reach that line's logical conclusion. Instead, like the child, it toys along one line then loses interest and jumps to another with out really understanding either.
Part of the blame rests with its Talking Heads, mathematicians and even Physicists who are, frankly, totally confused to the point that they can't put two and two together. All of them seem dominated by Wow mode rather than the simplicity and beauty of how our Universe really works.
And watching it all becomes very frustrating.
In particular, this episode, Did a Black Hole..., comes frustratingly close to how the first stars and galaxies were formed and then completely misses everything.
Way back at the beginning there was total darkness within which massive clouds of hydrogen and helium ions began to coalesce as the first star nurseries with one little quirk: within each cloud the first structure to emerge was as super-massive black hole whose creation sent shock waves reeling through the cloud, igniting the first stars which then began to organize themselves around that black hole as the earliest of spiral galaxies. This model is simplicity in itself and it takes only a little reasoning to understand that the super-massive black hole had to come first. The cloud's center, its densest area, would mature much, much faster than the smaller, isolated pockets of local densities destined to become stars.
And it is this model that this episode keeps dancing around, seeming to get it and then drawing back, getting it and then drawing back. In fact, as it progresses the closer it comes to this model without really getting there - wandering off the point, eventually babbling about colliding galaxies (us and Andromeda) and then a short coda about the End: all the stars burning out and nothing left but ashes and lonely black holes.
The Key point here is that this episode and most of the others cannot seem to stick to a single line of reasoning long enough to reach that line's logical conclusion. Instead, like the child, it toys along one line then loses interest and jumps to another with out really understanding either.
Part of the blame rests with its Talking Heads, mathematicians and even Physicists who are, frankly, totally confused to the point that they can't put two and two together. All of them seem dominated by Wow mode rather than the simplicity and beauty of how our Universe really works.
And watching it all becomes very frustrating.
