About Me

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Hi, my name is Ethyn Tyson and I am a first year finance major. I have little prior astronomy experience, however, I have taken aerospace engineering courses as well as basic physics. I chose to be a finance major because I felt that it gave me a lot of flexibility to work in the industry of my choice without sacrificing any pay. My hobbies include playing video games, playing guitar, and hanging out with friends. I hope this class teaches me more about how the world works and provides interesting information that will be enjoyable to me.

Episode 1: Standing Up in The Milky Way

I chose to watch the Neil Degrasse Tyson Cosmos series, as I find it easier to watch given the higher production value. The first episode, Standing Up in The Milky Way, Tyson introduces us to Bubble Theory. This idea was super interesting to me. Basically, it is the idea that our Universe could just be a “bubble” among millions of other bubbles. The theory is formally called Eternal Inflation theory. These bubbles are different patches throughout the Universe that have different properties, as different patches expand at different rates. I loved learning a little about this because it is such a difficult theory to imagine, an ever-expanding universe is incomprehensible to the human mind.

Another idea brought up by Tyson was Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar. The calendar is meant to put the timescale of the Universe into a format that is easier for us to understand. On this calendar, if the Big Bang were to occur on January 1st, the current moment is squeezed into the last minute of December 31st. Each second in this calendar equates to about 438 years.

Episode 2: Some of the Things That Molecules Do

Episode 2 of the Neil Degrasse Tyson Cosmos series takes an in-depth look at the evolution of life around us. The first concept discussed is the difference between artificial and natural selection. For example, the dogs we have today are direct descendants of wolves from years ago. We kept the friendliest ones and hunted the most aggressive, until we had the pets we have today.

On the other hand, natural selection can be seen in the bear populations over time. Polar bears have outlasted many other breeds because of their white coating, which allowed them higher levels of success in hunting, causing the dying out of other species.

Blog Post 3

In episode 3 of the Cosmos series, Tyson talks about comets. This was one of the most interesting concepts for me. Comets are balls of ice and rock, left over from the creation of the Solar System. They spend most of their time out in the Oort Cloud, almost one light year outside of the Sun but still gravitationally bound to it. The idea that there is a huge grouping of comets out in the Solar System is really cool!

Blog Post 4

Episode 4 of the cosmos series sees Tyson teaching about the development of agriculture over ten thousand years ago. Humans began domesticating plants and animals, allowing us a steady source of food for the first time in our history, and effectively expanding our possibility for population expansion.

Following this, Tyson takes us back to the cosmic calendar, and shows how this advancement was made less than half a minute ago in terms of cosmic time. It puts a sense of perspective over the whole idea, our sense of permanence as humans is small in terms of cosmic time.

Blog Post 5

In episode 5 of the Cosmos series, Tyson takes us early in the history of humans. Long ago, we used to believe that our thoughts came from our hearts, and not from our brains. People failed to understand where many illnesses and disorders, such as epilepsy, come from. Following this, Tyson speaks about Hippocrates, and the oath that doctors continue tot are to this day.

The idea that we used to believe the heart controlled our thoughts is super interesting to me. It is easy to see how it could come about, people with little understanding of human functions beyond the most basic could easily believe this.

Blog Post 6

This episode is about “all things big and small”. A quote given is, “There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies of the known universe.” This in itself is wild to think about. Later, Tyson teaches about the life found within a single droplet of water. Life inside a dewdrop is ruled by battles between single celled organisms like paramecium, these organisyshave their own little cosmos within the droplet.

Tyson also talks about tardigrades, a small single cell organism that exists in a ration of 1 human to a billion tardigrades!

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