Prof Brian Cox in The Sun:
The first mammals appeared on Earth around 225 million years ago, practically the blink of an eye in our planet’s 4.8 billion (4.8 thousand million) year history.
Complex animals appeared around 550 million years ago.
Before that, for more than 3,000 million years, Earth was dominated by much simpler living things.
Friday, 18 January 2013
His maths can only get better
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8 comments:
I'm no fan of Cox, but....
It's generally reckoned that life (bacteria) first appeared around 4 billion years ago. So he's close enough. For a fizzicyst.
VFTS, his version is a mess. He mixes up units (why not stick to millions?) and tells the whole story backwards with a huge figure missing.
Why not say:
"The earth has existed for 4,800 million years. It took 800 million years for the first life (bacteria) to appear and another 3,500 million years until the first complex animals appeared. Mammals did not appear until 300 millions years after that (225 million years ago)."
I don't rate Cox. For me there is something not quite right about his enthusiasm. It's as if he is always angling for a naive audience willing to marvel and to be mystified.
Maths looks ok to me. Have I missed something?
AKH, and women fancy him. That's the most annoying bit.
MIM, I refer you to my first comment. On a first reading, it doesn't add up, on closer inspection, each individual fact is probably correct, but so what.
AKH, Cox freely admits he was inspired by Carl Sagan (weren't we all?) - I suspect he's aiming for a similar presenting style and getting it slightly off-key, not least because the intervening years have increased the level of sophistication of the viewing public.
Still, as MW suggests, you aren't really the target audience; the floppy hair and boyish grin are probably trademarked somewhere under the aegis of the BBC's styling department.
McH, you're right. I watched a couple of Carl Sagan clips on YouTube to refresh my memory and establish that Coxy's presenting style - use of sweeping camera angles coming to rest on close ups of his cheeky smile while he makes longwinded and grandiose statements etc - is exactly the same.
Perhaps he's still D:reaming?
As he played keyboards, you'd think he'd lay out the time-line of these events in a linear progression as you suggest.
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