On the Gilmore Girls imitating life
Shan is a big fan of the "Gilmore Girls". I will admit to being interested enough to watch it occasionally with her. The other night, we watched an episode that she had recorded from a previous week -- I *think* it was the episode from 11/7. Anyway, the plot involved Lorelai & Christopher going to Yale for parents' weekend. During the visit, Christopher really wanted to take in some faculty lectures, and they wound up in an Astronomy lecture.
I have to say, I was incredibly impressed with what was a ~1 minute throwaway part of this show. They actually had the character talking about real, modern astronomy, including mentioning how the new supernovae results led astronomers to the conclusion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This part of the episode ended with Christopher asking something along the lines of, "are dark energy and the cosmological constant the same thing?".
During the episode, the "professor" had real Hubble images on the screen behind him, including this one. I suppose it shows exactly how much of a Hubble geek I am that I recognized that image instantaneously, remembered its caption title, and could find it in the Hubblesite gallery in about 5 seconds. I don't know if the show's writer / director / producer had any ulterior motives in presenting Hubble images and modern cosmology, but any show that gets good astronomy on a network besides PBS is good in my book.
What makes this whole experience even more surreal, though, was the colloquium we had at Penn State the day after I watched this episode -- it was presented by a new faculty member with a joint physics / astronomy appointment, and he presented his theory for the origin of the accelerating expansion.
I have to say, I was incredibly impressed with what was a ~1 minute throwaway part of this show. They actually had the character talking about real, modern astronomy, including mentioning how the new supernovae results led astronomers to the conclusion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This part of the episode ended with Christopher asking something along the lines of, "are dark energy and the cosmological constant the same thing?".
During the episode, the "professor" had real Hubble images on the screen behind him, including this one. I suppose it shows exactly how much of a Hubble geek I am that I recognized that image instantaneously, remembered its caption title, and could find it in the Hubblesite gallery in about 5 seconds. I don't know if the show's writer / director / producer had any ulterior motives in presenting Hubble images and modern cosmology, but any show that gets good astronomy on a network besides PBS is good in my book.
What makes this whole experience even more surreal, though, was the colloquium we had at Penn State the day after I watched this episode -- it was presented by a new faculty member with a joint physics / astronomy appointment, and he presented his theory for the origin of the accelerating expansion.
posted by Chris at 12:29 AM
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