Neil deGrasse Tyson gave a rousing defense of scientific principles in his characteristic brash way during his Purdue Northwest Sinai Forum presentation Sunday.
His talk gathered what PNW Sinai Forum Executive Director Leslie Plesac said was the largest group of high school and college students in recent memory for the lecture series.
“There’s a growing anti-intellectual strain in this society,” warned the astrophysicist, himself a star science communicator as well as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
“If you think the world is flat and you have influence over others,” he said, that’s when bad science becomes dangerous.
Tyson took a jab at people who believe the Earth is flat, including rapper B.o.B, who started a GoFundMe account in an attempt to prove Earth is flat.
“Discovery and exploration got us out of the caves,” Tyson said. Humans today are “standing on the shoulders of giants.”
“When you stand on the shoulders of those who came before, you might just realize the Earth isn’t flat,” he said.
Earth’s curvature isn’t obvious to anyone looking for the spherical planet’s curved edges from a low altitude because the planet is so large.
Tyson cited “Mad Mike Hughes,” who built a rocket in an attempt to prove the Earth was flat. Hughes died when the rocket exploded.
The Darwin Award, Tyson said, is awarded to childless people who die doing something incredibly dumb. “This culls the herd of really stupid people,” he said.
The lunar eclipse, Tyson pointed out, is proof the Earth is round. “This curve here is Earth’s conical shadow in space,” he said. “Notice the shadow is curved. The ancient Greeks noticed this.”
“There is only one shape whose shadow is always curved,” he said. That’s a sphere, not a flat disc.
Debunking bad science includes discussing alien concepts too.
“People want there to be aliens so badly, they take eyewitness testimony and want it to be reality,” Tyson said. But eyewitnesses can be wrong. “I need a witness, said no scientist ever.”
He shared news coverage of his visit to an Idaho ice cream parlor, with a store employee detailing the types of ice cream Tyson supposedly tried, but he insists he purchased his favorite, strawberry, and no other kind.
“Either they’re lying or the other black person in Idaho stopped by,” Tyson said.
With UFOs, unidentified flying objects, “you just admitted you don’t know what you’re looking at,” he said.
Those fuzzy photos from years ago can be debunked, he said. Throw a hubcap in the air, and you can create a UFO photo. “The hubcap aliens are visiting Earth.”
Those glowing clouds? That’s a natural phenomenon from light reflecting off the sun under certain conditions.
Remember seeing those photos that purported to show a spaceship crash-landed here? “I don’t want to meet those aliens. I want to meet the ones who know how to navigate,” Tyson said.
Now that smartphones are ubiquitous, there are fewer stories of UFOs and alien abductions, he said. “In the era of the smartphone, the reports of alien abductions have basically been reduced to zero” despite the 4 billion images and 1 million hours of video uploaded to the internet on a daily basis.
“Either the aliens must love restricted military airspace or they are really fuzzy,” Tyson said.
Abduction stories are entertaining even those reports are dwindling. “It’s really weird that aliens would come from across the galaxy just to probe your orifices,” Tyson said.
Remember those stereotypical images of purported aliens with giant eyes? Those eyes are so large there’s less room for a brain in their cranium, Tyson said.
Tyson often gets calls to comment on scientific discoveries.
The James Webb telescope has optics vastly superior to the Hubble telescope that preceded it. It’s generating images and discoveries that amaze the public. “Any time this makes a discovery, they call a scientist,” he said, but they should also call the engineers who figured out how to fold it up and launch it into space.
Tyson took issue with Americans’ attitudes when it comes to science and mathematics.
On the giant screen behind him, show showed a Statista.com chart based on 2015 data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, a list of countries in which 18- to 29-year-olds struggle with numeracy, or math skills. The United States was on the top of the list, based on 2015 data.
Another ranking showed the percentage of different countries’ population that believed humans evolved from an earlier species of animals. The United States was near the bottom of that list, just above Turkey.
Belief systems, too, got a few Tyson jabs.
“This is the 21st century. We have full-grown adults engineering elevators without the number 13,” he said.
The German History Museum in Munich displayed a sign for floor -1.
A bell curve formula on a Deutsche mark from the pre-Euro era honored Carl Friedrich Gauss. “We have one scientist on our currency. Who is that? Benjamin Franklin. If you don’t know that, you don’t make enough to know who’s on the $100 bill,” Tyson said.
And Franklin was chosen because he was a Founding Father, not because of his scientific background.
Tyson fielded a few questions from the audience on science issues.
One woman said she had seen recent data about young galaxies having a preferred direction of rotation and wondering what that meant.
“It could mean that we’re all living in a black hole. Deal with it,” Tyon replied.
“The problem with that study is it’s only one section of the universe and not all sections. It remains to be verified by other studies. That’s how science fully works,” he said.
A boy asked about the boiling temperature of water not being the same at different locations.
If you boil water at sea level, like in Northwest Indiana, the temperature will stop going up at 212 degrees because the excess energy is converting water to steam while the water is boiling.
“The water the temperature boils at relates to how much air pressure is pressing down on your water,” he said. At a higher altitude, cooking times change because there’s less air pressure.
That’s on Earth. Get prepared to have your mind blown.
“If the air pressure is so thin you can lower the boiling point of water so low that it equals the freezing point of water,” as is the case on Mars, you can have a vat of boiling water that can sustain ice cubes and generates steam, Tyson said. “Solid, liquid and gas, the triple point of water.”
Urschel Laboratories President and CEO Rik Urschel, a self-professed astronomy buff, said he “was over-the-moon excited” about the prospect of bringing Tyson to speak in Northwest Indiana ever since 2017, when he began working with Plesac and others to line up speakers for the annual series.
Urschel, who had the Saturn V model rocket he built as a kid on display in his office, told of using a telescope in his parents’ driveway in 1986 to see Halley’s Comet.
Earlier this fall, PNW declined to disclose how much Tyson would be paid for his talk, claiming it was a “trade secret.” Tyson is represented by Jodi Solomon Speakers Bureau, Inc., which did not respond to a request for comment, but another agency’s website lists his speaker’s fee as $100,000 or more.
Post-Tribune archives contributed.
Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.