Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey - The Review - No one was more excited than me about Dr. Neil Tyson doing a reboot of "Cosmos". Not only is he a worthy successor to Carl Sagan, I argued he was better than Sagan. But when I got the screener, I had a sense of dread.

It's not that he was simply trying to be controversial - everything from his role in demoting Pluto to his non-stop attacks on Christians shows he likes to create controversy first and rationalize it as evidence-based later - the problem instead was there was so much the show got wrong. Now, he did not write it but he should know better. He doesn't always know better, and he is free to talk about things he knows nothing about, but letting his voice be the one that so thoroughly botched the history of Giordano Bruno was unfortunate.

That great whooshing sound was religious and culturally neutral people who stopped watching the show.

Bruno was a crank, his science never once got mentioned during his trial, because he had none, it was all cobbled together philosophy rubbish. Scientists of the time made fun of him, no one cited him because he had no papers. He was a sun worshipper, plain and simple, a heretic who got the best part of a decade to stop saying Catholics needed to switch to Hermetism and worship Thoth, but he didn't do it. He was a martyr for magic, not science. Unfortunately, Cosmos was never really much better than that.