We're at week 4 of Cosmos: The Rebootening, and since last week was all about how Isaac Newton revolutionized physics, then for this week's episode, it's time (and space and gravity) for Einstein. As an English major, Yr. Dok Zoom has what you'd call a "lay understanding" of relativity and some of the crazier stuff in modern physics, which is to say that I understand it up to a point, and then I have to go lay down.
Still, Neil deGrasse Tyson is going to try his damnedest (which is very damned indeed) to pull us science ninnies along with him as we explore how time, space, gravity, and the speed of light are all connected, even if it does make our heads feel a little wibbly-wobbly. To start off with, we get a little family scene, an animation of the astronomer William Herschel (voiced by Patrick Stewart) explaining to his son John on a nighttime beach that he doesn't believe in ghosts, but that the light we see from the stars is ghostly, in a sense -- depending on the star, we may see light that began its trip to our eyes centuries ago, from stars that may be dead now, but whose death we won't see for more centuries.
