TV is the New Reading

‘The Universe’: Second

season seems a little loopy

The History Channel’s second season of “The Universe” takes its subject matter from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The first season was amazing. The photography available of the planets and moons in our own solar system, along with the sun itself, was simply breathtaking, and supported informative narration based in scientific fact and in many cases, direct observation.

About the most speculative entry in that first season was a segment on planetary disasters. I recall the computer-generated imagery dominating the material and thinking that if I wanted to watch speculative fiction I could switch over to Spike TV, where I’d almost certainly find an episode of “Star Trek” of one stripe or another.

This season, I suppose I can also tune in to The History Channel, Tuesday nights at 8 p.m.

Speculative

Take “Mysteries of the Moon.” Last season the program examined the moon with cold hard science, discussing its distance from Earth and different scientific schools of thought concerning its origin and its geology.

This season’s “Mysteries” installment went in the other direction entirely. Scientists talked about transient luminescent phenomena where little bright spots appear on the moon but no one knows for sure what’s causing them. They went on to discuss extreme tidal events which are based entirely on shoreline geography. Then there was 20 minutes of weirdness in which real-life doctors and police officers speculated as to whether people go a little bit “nuts” when the moon is full.

If they wanted to talk about lunar mythology, that’d be fine, but they’d have been better served by bringing in spiritualists and poets. Trying to account for scientific mysteries simply by cataloging them and going “ooooooo” is ... unsatisfying.

Then there was the second-season installment on “cosmic holes,” talking about black holes, white holes and wormholes.

First off, we only know of the existence of black holes, which are improbably dense remnants of collapsed stars from which even light cannot escape. We can’t observe them directly, but we can observe their effects on nearby stars.

As for the others, scientists once believed incredibly distant quasi-stellar objects called “quasars” represented white holes – that is, a source of new matter in the universe – because of the energy they were throwing off in their wake. But it turned out that they were not. And regarding wormholes, despite the allowance for them in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, we’ve not encountered even transient evidence of them, stable or otherwise.

And yet the “cosmic holes” installment of “The Universe” was just as long as last season’s installment on Mars, the red planet, which we’re reasonably certain does exist.

“The Universe” is still interesting, on some level. This season has featured a relatively self-contained and scientifically responsible discussion of the Milky Way galaxy – our home galaxy – which if nothing else bore out most of the material in Eric Idle’s song about it in the movie “The Meaning of Life.” And throughout, the show is reasonably interesting if occasionally speculative.

But in terms of hard science, you’re better off watching for reruns of Season One.

Season Two seems like it might have been written under a full moon.

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