In this episode of the Cosmos: A spacetime Odyssey, Neil DeGrasse Tyson discusses the stars and how planets moved around the solar system. At the beginning of the episode, he discusses how people used the stars to predict the future. He often said that people viewed comets as an angry god’s message to people and this led to overall fear of comets. Neil DeGrasse Tyson discusses how a comets origin only became known due to the work of Jan Oort who debunked that the entire solar system revolves around the sun. Instead he introduced Oort clouds as a concept that the Universe is in constant random motion outside of our solar system. NDT also discusses how Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley introduced major works to describe the laws of motion and how they relate to our Universe, much to the disdain of popular scientists at the time.
Overall, I really enjoyed this episode because it shows the evolution of mankind’s thought processes about the Cosmos. Although there is always more to explore, I feel like this episode was a great summary of humanities discoveries of the Cosmos so far.
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