Tyson can't suppress his JerknessIs this another case of Tyson using false "facts" to attack the Other? Regardless of the factuality, it was an attack nonetheless.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sparked an Internet supernova on Christmas Day when he took to Twitter to troll Christians.
"On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world," the "Cosmos" host tweeted Thursday. "Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642."
The meteoric missive by the director of the Hayden Planetarium was retweeted more than 57,000 times and sparked plenty of vitriol.
Tyson — long despised among religious conservatives — further incensed the faithful celebrating the birth of Jesus by tweeting: "Merry Christmas to all. A Pagan holiday (BC) becomes a Religious holiday (AD). Which then becomes a Shopping holiday (USA)."
Others disputed the date Tyson cited for the birth of Newton, the father of modern physics.
"No, he didn't," tweeted @fedkusko. "According to the Gregorian calendar he was born January 4th 1643."
But here's the thing: Newton's (classical) physics did change the world in a mechanistic fashion, but it failed to be an accurate representation of "reality". Quantum mechanics has shown that at its base reality is not so deterministic nor is it composed of mass (aka matter in Newton's time) at all; it is composed of fields, which produce apparent behavior that, in the limit of its special case, could be modeled as the mass which Newton's physics used. Einstein proved that the entire concept of "mass" is unnecessary due to the warping of space by virtue of field intensities. One might compare the utility of Newton's mass to the utility of the epicycles of Ptolemy.
In terms of completeness, Newton's physics was a 250 year flash in the pan. But it was, and is, useful if one understands its limits. His math, however, will remain useful as a universal method of approximation modeling of the visible universe. There is no question of Newton's towering intellect and the impact of his intellectual life.
But returning to Tyson: he's just an Atheist ass.
2 comments:
When Saturnalia was popular the Roman religion was the dominant religion of the world, so it was not a Pagan holiday in BC now was it? Post reformation Christians even advocated against Christmas, calling it an un-biblical Catholic invention.
Additionally his attempt to implicate the USA for Christmas' commercialism is severely misplaced. It was Christians in the US who were slow to receive the Christmas traditions from Europe, where humanist Charles Dickens had revived the holiday in pop culture through his tale A Christmas Carol. Even the term Merry Christmas, so vilified by ignorant Atheist originated in that story.
I guess when you have PhD everything that comes out of your mouth is absolute truth. In parlance to 80s lingo "Not!"
Tyson needs to be reminded that his hero,Newton, was an ardent adherent of Christ and that the religion he detests so much is responsible for his profession.Newtonian physics which derived from thee astronomical models of the middle ages,higher mathematics and the scientific method were all pioneered by Christians.Perhaps Tyson would've preferred the pseudo-science of the pagan Romans and Greeks of antiquity.
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