deGrasse Tyson...philosophy and science

"Neil deGrasse Tyson, Philosophy & Science"

by

Mike LaBossiere

May 12th, 2014

The Philosophers' Magazine

In March of 2014 popular astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson did a Nerdist Podcast. This did not garner much attention until May when some philosophers realized that Tyson was rather critical and dismissive of philosophy. As might be imagined, there was a response from the defenders of philosophy. Some critics went so far as to accuse him of being a philistine.

Tyson presents a not uncommon view of contemporary philosophy, namely that “asking deep questions” can cause a “pointless delay in your progress” in engaging “this whole big world of unknowns out there.” To avoid such pointless delays, Tyson advises scientists to respond to such questioners by saying, “I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind, and you can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by deep questions you’ve asked of yourself. I don’t have time for that.”
 
Since Tyson certainly seems to be a deep question sort of guy, it is tempting to consider that his remarks are not serious—that is, he is being sarcastic. Even if he is serious, it is also reasonable to consider that these remarks are off-the cuff and might not represent his considered view of philosophy in general.

It is also worth considering that the claims made are his considered and serious position. After all, the idea that a scientist would regard philosophy as useless (or worse) is quite consistent with my own experiences in academics. For example, the politically fueled rise of STEM and the decline of the humanities has caused some in STEM to regard this situation as confirmation of their superior status and on some occasions I have had to defuse conflicts instigated by STEM faculty making their views about the uselessness of non-STEM fields clear.

Whatever the case, the concern that the deep questioning of philosophy can cause pointless delays does actually have some merit and is well worth considering. After all, if philosophy is useless or even detrimental, then this would certainly be worth knowing.

The main bite of this criticism is that philosophical questioning is detrimental to progress: a scientist who gets caught in these deep questions, it seems, would be like a kayaker caught in a strong eddy: she would be spinning around and going nowhere rather than making progress. This concern does have significant practical merit. To use an analogy outside of science, consider a committee meeting aimed at determining the curriculum for state schools. This committee has an objective to achieve and asking questions is a reasonable way to begin. But imagine that people start raising deep questions about the meaning of terms such as “humanities” or “science” and become very interested in sorting out the semantics of various statements. This sort of sidetracking will result in a needlessly long meeting and little or no progress. After all, the goal is to determine the curriculum and deep questions will merely slow down progress towards this practical goal. Likewise, if a scientist is endeavoring to sort out the nature of the cosmos, deep questions can be a similar sort of trap: she will be asking ever deeper questions rather than gathering data and doing math to answer her less deep questions.

Philosophy, as Socrates showed by deploying his Socratic method, can endlessly generate deep questions. Questions such as “what is the nature of the universe?”, “what is time?”, “what is space?”, “what is good?” and so on. Also, as Socrates showed, for each answer given, philosophy can generate more questions. It is also often claimed that this shows that philosophy really has no answers since every alleged answer can be questioned or raises even more questions. Thus, philosophy seems to be rather bad for the scientist.

A key assumption seems to be that science is different from philosophy in at least one key way—while it raises questions, proper science focuses on questions that can be answered or, at the very least, gets down to the business of answering them and (eventually) abandons a question should it turn out to be a distracting deep question. Thus, science provides answers and makes progress. This, obviously enough, ties into another stock criticism of philosophy: philosophy makes no progress and is useless.

One rather obvious reason that philosophy is regarded as not making progress and as being useless is that when enough progress is made on a deep question, it is perceived as being a matter for science rather than philosophy. For example, ancient Greek philosophers, such as Democritus, speculated about the composition of the universe and its size (was it finite or infinite?) and these were considered deep philosophical questions. Even Newton considered himself a natural philosopher. He has, of course, been claimed by the scientist (many of whom conveniently overlook the role of God in his theories). These questions are now claimed by physicists, such as Tyson, who regard them as scientific rather than philosophical questions.

Thus, it is rather unfair to claim that philosophy does not solve problems or make progress—since when excellent progress is made, the discipline is labeled as science and no longer considered philosophy. However, the progress would have obviously been impossible without the deep questions that set people in search of answers and the work done by philosophers before the field was claimed as a science. To use an analogy, to claim that philosophy has made no progress or contributions would be on par with a student taking the work done by another, adding to it and then claiming the whole as his own work and deriding the other student as “useless.”

At this point, some might be willing to grudgingly concede that philosophy did make some valuable contributions (perhaps on par with how the workers who dragged the marble for Michelangelo’s David contributed) in the past, but philosophy is now an eddy rather than the current of progress.

Interestingly enough, philosophy has been here before—back in the days of Socrates the Sophists contended that philosophical speculation was valueless and that people should focus on getting things done—that is, achieving success. Fortunately for contemporary science, philosophy survived and philosophers kept asking those deep questions that seemed so valueless then.

While philosophy’s day might be done, it seems worth considering that some of the deep, distracting philosophical questions that are being asked are well worth pursuing—if only because they might lead to great things. Much as how Democritus’ deep questions led to the astrophysics that a fellow named Neil loves so much.

Neil deGrasse Tyson...a philistine?

Neil deGrasse Tyson...a philistine?

No worse than Hawking philosophizing.

"Why Neil deGrasse Tyson is a philistine"

The popular television host says he has no time for deep, philosophical questions. That's a horrible message to send to young scientists.

by

Damon Linker

May 6th, 2014

The Week

Neil deGrasse Tyson may be a gifted popularizer of science, but when it comes to humanistic learning more generally, he is a philistine. Some of us suspected this on the basis of the historically and theologically inept portrayal of Giordano Bruno in the opening episode of Tyson's reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

But now it's been definitively demonstrated by a recent interview in which Tyson sweepingly dismisses the entire history of philosophy. Actually, he doesn't just dismiss it. He goes much further — to argue that undergraduates should actively avoid studying philosophy at all. Because, apparently, asking too many questions "can really mess you up."

Yes, he really did say that. Go ahead,  listen for yourself , beginning at 20:19 — and behold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. He proudly proclaims his irritation with "asking deep questions" that lead to a "pointless delay in your progress" in tackling "this whole big world of unknowns out there." When a scientist encounters someone inclined to think philosophically, his response should be to say, "I'm moving on, I'm leaving you behind, and you can't even cross the street because you're distracted by deep questions you've asked of yourself. I don't have time for that."

"I don't have time for that."

With these words, Tyson shows he's very much a 21st-century American, living in a perpetual state of irritated impatience and anxious agitation. Don't waste your time with philosophy! (And, one presumes, literature, history, the arts, or religion.) Only science will get you where you want to go! It gets results! Go for it! Hurry up! Don't be left behind! Progress awaits!

There are many ways to respond to this indictment. One is to make the case for progress in philosophical knowledge. This would show that Tyson is wrong because he fails to recognize the real advances that happen in the discipline of philosophy over time.

I'll leave this for others to do, since I don't buy such progress myself. I very seriously believe that Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, or Wittgenstein may have gotten just about everything right all those decades, centuries, and even millennia ago — and I know of no professional philosophers writing today who come anywhere close to rivaling the brilliance and depth of these thinkers.

Tyson is right about one thing: Philosophy is primarily about posing questions. But he's wrong to view such questioning as a pernicious waste of time. If Socrates is to be believed, it may actually be the best way of life for a human being — and quite possibly the only way to avoid the dogmatism to which all thinking is prone, and to which Tyson himself certainly has fallen prey.

Allow me to explain.

Philosophy arose in the West when a handful of ancient Greeks began to question the truth of received (dogmatic) explanations for various occurrences. Whereas it was commonly presumed that the gods were responsible for the weather, crop yields, and a city's success or failure on the battlefield, these early philosophers proposed, instead, that something called "nature," which operates according to regular and necessary laws, might be the true cause.

These early philosophers were forerunners of today's natural scientists, in other words, and one imagines that Tyson would treat them with the kind of condescending respect that scientists often reserve for their forerunners in the history of science. This is especially likely in the case of Democritus, who made an uncannily good guess when he proposed at some point late in the fifth century B.C. that all matter is composed of indivisible particles called "atoms."

Socrates appears to have been one of these natural philosophers in his youth. But at some point he became convinced that the anti-dogmatism of his fellow philosophers concealed an even deeper dogmatism. Like the poets, politicians, and craftsmen he regularly talked to on the streets of Athens, the natural philosophers were incapable of giving a coherent account of their own activity and why it was good. They couldn't explain the nature and origins of the concepts they presupposed in their own thinking. They couldn't consistently define what they meant by such fundamental ideas as truth, goodness, nobility, beauty, and justice. Neither could they consistently explain what they hoped for from the knowledge they so passionately pursued.

If the natural philosophers truly wished to liberate themselves from dogma in all of its forms and live lives of complete intellectual wakefulness and self-awareness, they would need to pose far more searching questions. They would need to begin reflecting on human nature as both a part of and distinct from the wider natural world. They would need to begin examining their own minds and motives, very much including their motives in taking up the pursuit of philosophical knowledge in the first place.

Philosophy rightly understood is the mind's rigorous, open-ended, radically undogmatic pursuit of this self-knowledge.

If what you crave is answers, the study of philosophy in this sense can be hugely frustrating and unsatisfying. But if you want to understand yourself as well as the world around you — including why you're so impatient for answers, and progress, in the first place — then there's nothing more thrilling and gratifying than training in philosophy and engaging with its tumultuous, indeterminate history.

Not that many young people today recognize its value. There are always an abundance of reasons to resist raising the peskiest, most difficult questions of oneself and the world. To that list, our time has added several more: technological distractions, economic imperatives, cultural prejudices, ideological commitments.

And now Neil deGrasse Tyson has added another — one specially aimed at persuading scientifically minded young people to reject self-examination and the self-knowledge that goes along with it.

He should be ashamed of himself.   

"Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey"...a review

Overall, the program was a dismal failure. It wasn't even an hour long being interrupted by dozens of commercials. Why didn't PBS pick up on this science program? I like Neil deGrasse Tyson but his presence as narrator simply failed to illuminate much interest. I seriously doubt that I will watch the remaining episodes.

"Cosmos" Part III, an all CGI feature and hosted by some form of AI, will probably air in three and a half decades.

"Neil deGrasse Tyson's 'Cosmos' premiere ratings not so stellar on Fox"

by

Scott Collins

March 10th, 2014

The Los Angeles Times

To paraphrase the late Carl Sagan, billions and billions failed to show up for "Cosmos."

A reboot of Sagan's 1980 smash science series on PBS, "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" premiered on Fox on Sunday, this time with outspoken astrophysicist and science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson as host and — of all people — "Family Guy" writer-producer Seth MacFarlane as executive producer along with Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan. (Sagan died in 1996.)

But despite heavy promotion and curiosity — a science documentary right after "Family Guy," how crazy is that? — "Cosmos" did not exactly deliver a big bang, with 5.8 million total viewers, according to Nielsen.

That amounted to third place in the 9 p.m. time slot. Instead of true science, more viewers seemed to prefer sci-fi drama, with 13.3 million tuning in to the launch of ABC's "Resurrection," about the dead returning to life. It was this season's most-watched drama premiere after CBS' "Intelligence," which had the benefit of an "NCIS" lead-in back in January.

As for "Cosmos," it premiered simultaneously on 10 networks, including Fox, National Geographic, FX and FXX. Those numbers should be available later on Monday. Given the broad distribution, plus the time-shifting capabilities of DVRs, "Cosmos" might ultimately yield a decent audience.


"Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey"...airs March 9th

"Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey"...airs March 9th

"Neil deGrasse Tyson explains why the new Cosmos matters so much"

by

Jason Shankel

March 3rd, 2014

io9

This Sunday, March 9th, what is arguably the most important science show of all time returns to TV as Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts an all-new, updated version of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. We caught up with Neil DeGrasse Tyson on his whirlwind tour of the universe to discuss the what the show is and isn't, explaining why science matters to modern audiences, and his personal asteroid.

io9: How has the press tour been treating you?

Neil deGrasse Tyson: It's exhausting but exhilarating. While it's a huge hit to my day's calendar, I'm persistently reminded that for most people who are conducting interviews it's not "oh, this show is coming out and I gotta do an article." There's an enthusiasm and an anticipation. I find I'm deeply hopeful about what this means for the future of America and the world, that science literacy is something that can be embraced and nurtured and that the comfort level people have with science can change.
 
We were certainly excited to hear that you would be updating this series. We've come so far since 1980, not just in science but in visual effects and filmmaking that this is a great way to carry forward Dr. Sagan's legacy.

Tyson: The methods and tools of storytelling are significantly advanced, yes, but it's not only that. Because it's on network, we have some resources that have allowed us access to people who have previously brought their craft to cinema. Our director of photography is Bill Pope, who was the director of photography for the Matrix trilogy and Spider-Man.

When you think of a typical documentary, you think of somebody in a lab coat with a test tube and there's a camera on a tripod and they get asked a question and they answer it. In that scenario, the camera is visiting the scene. It's you, listening to the person.

When Bill Pope gets a hold of a camera, he brings the methods and tools he developed working on those films to bear on our telling of the story of the universe. So now when you see Cosmos, it doesn't just affect you intellectually, as it should, but also emotionally and spiritually. Spiritually with a small "s" — the awe and wonder of looking up. Because of this we have high expectations for the potency of the series.

Were there other factors that went into the decision to air this on commercial television, as opposed to PBS?

Tyson: When we first shopped around the idea, we went to the normal list of networks, PBS, Discovery Channel, Science Channel and National Geographic. While we were doing this, I met Seth MacFarlane at a special meeting in California intended to connect Hollywood storytellers and artists with scientists. I didn't think much would come of it, but Seth called me one day when he was in New York and invited me to lunch. He told me he wanted to do something to serve science in America and he asked me what he should do. I thought maybe he could invest in a pilot that we could use to show sponsors. He said "I have a good idea, let's take it to Fox."

Now, there are a series of thoughts I'm about to share with you that I think lasted about 12 seconds. My first thought was "This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard, he doesn't get it, this is a waste of a lunch."
But then I said, "Wait a minute, Fox is 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight Pictures, they brought Avatar and Slumdog Millionaire to the screen. Yes, there's Fox News, but also the Fox Network which has acerbic liberal commentary of The Simpsons and Family Guy. And there's Fox Sports. I realized Fox has more demographics of American culture going through their portfolio than any other network. And so, I concluded that there's no better place to be than on Fox.

So 12 seconds later I told him it was a great idea.

You often talk about the need for science to feed our everyday needs, to spur innovation and fuel the economy. Now you're working in an industry, filmmaking and visual effects, that has benefitted greatly from that kind of technological achievement. Do you feel that validates your point of view on the role of science in culture?

Tyson: My view is slightly different from that. It's not that space itself is what will be our savior. It's that when you go into space, it stimulates an interest in the STEM fields. It's the stimulated interest that promotes innovation in science and technology that leads to the 21st century economy. It's not "let's go to space because space does all this." It doesn't do it directly. It does it indirectly. And you get to make discoveries along the way. That's the fun part.

The IT revolution, as significant as it is, has left us unfulfilled with regard to transportation, energy use and infrastructure. There's more to society than information. We've been distracted by the stunning advances that information technology has brought us, to the exclusion of very deeply held needs that we have in society.

What is our control over natural forces so we don't have disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes? Do we run away from them? Or do we find a way to tap the energy of a hurricane and have that energy drive the city that the storm would have otherwise leveled? This is a whole other frontier that would be addressed if we go into space, because space involves hardware, people, going places you've never been before, life support, a knowledge of the solar system and the sun, and I see that as a transformative force that can turn a sleepy nation into an innovation nation.

You've been somewhat critical of people who say that our problem is leadership, that we need another Kennedy to lead us back into space. Did I see that you called Buzz Aldrin "clueless?"

Tyson: Ha ha! I don't remember calling him "clueless." I at one point said that there are factions among us who suffer from "Apollo necrophilia."

The context was he said something about our need to go into space being driven by our destiny or our DNA.

Tyson: I certainly have arguments against that. If I said something halfway disrespectful it's because we're friends and I can get away with it. He longed for the days when people remembered every astronaut that was launched. That was one of my early disagreements with him. It's the fact that we don't know the names of astronauts that makes it evident that going into space has become routine, and that's a good thing.

Speaking of things becoming routine, how do audiences today compare with 1980? Do you feel that people need less basic science explained to them today? Or more?

Tyson: As an educator in modern times, I'm going to answer you differently than I would have 35 years ago, because I'm just that old. My day job is in a museum. How long does a person stay at a museum? A couple of hours? There are people who would want exhibits at a museum to have a whole lesson plan so you can poll people and ask them "What did you learn?" Then you'd judge the success of the exhibit based on how well people do on these exams.

I have a different view. The person is going to spend incalculably more time in a classroom than they ever will in a museum. So a museum shouldn't be a supplement to a classroom. It should be a force to ignite flames within a person's soul of curiosity. An exhibit should make a person say "Wow! I've got to find out more about this!" and trigger them to explore more advanced accountings of the topic, in books or science videos. Once the flame is lit, the learning becomes self-motivating.

Cosmos at its best should be about that, and not about presenting you Wikipedia pages to read.

What would Carl Sagan learn if he was able to see your version of Cosmos?

Tyson: I want to clarify that the goal of this Cosmos is not to update the science. A lot of science has happened in the last 35 years. We've discovered a thousand exoplanets, for example. But that's not the goal, because any time of day you can channel surf and find a documentary about black holes, colliding galaxies, the search for life, the Big Bang, dark matter, the Higgs-Boson, etc. There's no end of documentaries that serve that goal.

Cosmos has, as its mission statement, the effort to convey to you why science matters. That is a different motivating factor than "Here's all this science I want to teach you." When you take ownership of why science matters, then you are self-motivated, driven. You take the responsibility yourself to continue to learn. It's a new Cosmos not because there's so much more universe to talk about, but because the country and the world needs to know more than ever why science matters.

You've said that astrophysicists are the most humble people in the world because they confront their ignorance on a daily basis.

Tyson: Ha ha! Precisely. If you ask me what was around before the Big Bang, I have no idea. What's at the center of a black hole? I have no idea. What is dark matter? Dark energy? I have no idea. These are not complex questions that require an advanced degree to ask. There are things we do know, and we're proud of that, but as scientists we use that to put a foot in the unknown and use what we know as a carrot to keep us searching.

You've said that dark matter and dark energy should be renamed "Fred" and "Wilma." Care to elaborate on that?

Tyson: Yeah, because if I say "dark matter" you say "What kind of matter is that?" Well, we don't even know if it's matter. It's really dark gravity. Dark matter is a misleading term. There is so much first impression in the word. People ask "What do dark matter and dark energy have in common?" because they sound the same.

If I called them Fred and Wilma you wouldn't ask what they have in common. You'd ask about them separately. But because they both have the word "dark" in them, people think they're related. Maybe they are, but at the moment there's no evidence that's at all the case. These are two entities that got involved in the name game earlier than I think they should have.

The main belt asteroid 13123, discovered by Shoemaker and Levy, was named "Tyson" after you. How does it feel to be a literal rock star?

Tyson: Ha! I never thought about it that way! In fact, the very word "asteroid" means "star-like" in Latin. In a telescope, they look just like stars, dots of light. In the early days, people just named things after what they look like.

But it is a high honor, although given the number on my asteroid, it should tell you that there 13,122 other asteroids with names on them. So, it's not a very exclusive club. I have many more achievements that fewer other people have achieved than had asteroid named after them.

Yet, it's still kind of a cool thing. Yeah, asteroid. Still kind of cool.
 
Cosmos premieres on March 9th on Fox.

Neil deGrasse Tyson smacked by kids over Pluto's status

"6 Angry Letters Kids Sent Neil deGrasse Tyson About Pluto"

by

Lucas Reilly

August 4th, 2013

Mental Floss

In 2000, the Rose Center for Earth and Space opened with a giant model of the solar system as its centerpiece. But something was different about the mega-sized mobile—Pluto was missing. When the New York Times mentioned the missing piece, people started saying, “Hey! What gives?” Six years later, Pluto was officially stripped of its planetary status by the International Astronomical Union, demoting it to “dwarf planet.”

The biggest brouhaha, though, came from teams of elementary school students, who flooded Director Neil deGrasse Tyson’s desk with hate mail. Here’s what some of them had to say, loosely following the five stages of grief.

 

Dear Natural History Museum,

You are missing planet Pluto. Please make a model of it. This is what it looks like. It is a planet.

Love, Will Galmot (Seven years old)

 

Dear Mr. Tyson,

I think Pluto is a planet. Why do you think Pluto is no longer a planet? I do not like your anser!!! Pluto is my faveret planet!!! You are going to have to take all of the books away and change them.

Pluto is a planet!!!!!!!

Your friend, Emerson York

 

Dear scientest,

What do you call Pluto if its not a planet anymore? If you make it a planet agian all the science books will be right. Do poeple live on Pluto? If there are poeple who live there they won’t exist. Why can’t Pluto be a planet? If it’s small doesn’t mean that it doen’t have to be a planet anymore. Some poeple like Pluto. If it doen’t exist then they don’t have a favorite planet. Please write back, but not in cursive because I can’t read in cursive.

Your friend, Madeline Trost

Dear Dr. Neil Tysen degrasse,

At first, remember all of those kids that send you bad letters? Well, I want to apolijize all the things that we were wrong about. We’re sorry about giving you mean letters saying we love Pluto but not you. I’m very sorry. It’ll be ok.

Taylor (Seven years old)

Dear Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson,

I know how you feel. We feel the same about Pluto not being a planet. I’m to but we just have to get over it—that’s science. We to learn about science. Science will make you smart!

Love! Siddiq (Eight years old)

What a group: Day, Greene, Flatow, Tyson, Krauss, Dawkins, Nye, Stephenson

Tracy Day, Brian Greene (standing), Ira Flatow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Bill Nye, and Neal Stephenson at Arizona State University for the Origins Project's Origins Stories weekend.

"Neil deGrasse Tyson on Van Gogh's Role in Space Exploration and Other Great Tales of Science"

by

Torie Bosch

April 1st, 2013

Slate

Science panels don’t normally involve a striptease, even a G-rated one.

But on Saturday, March 30, Neil deGrasse Tyson took off his shirt to prove a point about the stars, science, and art.

It happened at Arizona State University during “The Science of Storytelling,” a panel featuring Tyson, Science Friday’s Ira Flatow, World Science Festival Executive Director Tracy Day, physicist Brian Greene, atheism rock star Richard Dawkins, science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and host Lawrence Krauss.

ASU’s Origins Project, which is directed by Krauss, sponsored the panel as part of a series of weekend events celebrating science, reason, and stories. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and the New America Foundation in Future Tense, and Krauss is a regular Future Tense contributor.) As part of the festivities, the radio show Science Friday broadcast live from ASU, and there was also a Friday night screening of and discussion about The Unbelievers, a documentary following Krauss and Dawkins as they travel the world to promote atheism and skeptical thinking. Cameron Diaz, who appears briefly in The Unbelievers, even took to the stage with Krauss, Dawkins, and authors Ian McEwan and Cormac McCarthy to discuss the film. (Upon introducing Diaz to the audience, Krauss remarked that he initially met her at World Science Fest a few years back—and during their first conversation, he apologized to her for having been surprised to see her there.)

In his opening remarks at “The Science of Storytelling” on Saturday, Krauss said, “One of the things I like to tell students … not all the problems are solved. There’s still an incredible need to understand things in the universe.” By telling the human stories behind the science, we can stop making it feel like something that was “done by dead white men.” Accordingly, each panelist told a tale (or several) about science—and that’s where Tyson’s shirt comes in.

Tyson was riffing on a familiar theme: art’s relationship with science. For eons, he said, artists had a responsibility to paint primarily what they saw. But with the advent of photography—science!—“it was no longer the obligation of the artist to capture reality.” That’s when he shucked his beige button-down to display a T-shirt bearing Van Gogh’s Starry Night. (Tyson’s office at the American Museum of Natural History boasts both a Starry Night print and a Starry Night pillow, which he showed off in a Science Friday video in March 2012.)

Van Gogh, he said,

    didn’t call the painting Sleepy Village, Cypress Tree, Church Steeple, Hills. It is the first painting that I know of … [in which] the background is the subject of the painting, and that background is the night sky, and it [has] elevated the cosmos to become fair game to the artist. I submit to you that science, scientific discovery, especially cosmic discovery, does not become mainstream until the artists embrace the fruits of those discoveries. So I applaud Vincent van Gogh for thinking that the sky is what mattered more than anything in the foreground for this painting.

Tyson famously criticized director James Cameron over the night sky portrayed in Titanic as the ship sinks. After receiving a “snarky” email from Tyson, Cameron corrected the stars for the film’s 10th anniversary rerelease. So, Tyson said at ASU, people have often asked him why he doesn’t object to the untrue-to-life celestial bodies seen in Starry Night.
 
I was asked, given how nitpicky I was about the wrong sky over Kate Winslet as she floated on that plank … what do I think about the Van Gogh sky? Clearly that’s not accurate. My reply was, “In the case of the artist, I don’t want them to represent reality because I have that via my own telescopes. I want and need the artist to take me to new places, and the new place that Van Gogh took me not the sky as it is but the sky as he felt it. And the more of us that feel the universe, the better off we will be in this world.”

As he wrapped up, Krauss interjected, “You notice that Pluto is not on this shirt.”

“Get over it,” shot back Tyson, who has confessed to “driv[ing] the getaway car” in Pluto’s demotion from planetary status.

Much of the evening was devoted to pointing out just how straight-up cool science is—and the 3,000-person crowd reveled in it, especially during raucous disputes between panelists over space privatization, math as the “language of the universe,” and whether we could ever find out what consciousness really is. During a particularly contentious bout, Tyson stood up as if to go after Greene—and Nye held him back as Greene fled.

But the panelists turned serious at moments. “If we only talk about how fun science is, we don’t do it justice,” Dawkins said. In recognition of one of science’s less-admirable facets, Krauss concluded the night with a frank acknowledgment: that Tracy Day was the only woman on the eight-person panel. Krauss said that he hopes that that won’t be the case much longer. The speakers were “the old guard,” Krauss said. “And I’m hoping that we will encourage young women to go into science and go into communicating about science so when we have this panel in the future, we’ll have an all-female panel.”

That would be a story worth hearing.


Astronomy...art

Astronomy--forensics

Van Gogh's mystery star at the White House

The Planet Krypton found according to Neil deGrasse Tyson

"Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Heroic Quest To Pinpoint Superman’s Home Planet"

by

Will Oremus

November 9th, 2012

Slate

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist extraordinaire, can sometimes seem like a character in a superhero comic. Now he is one.

Tyson, the charismatic director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, appears in DC Comics' newest Superman issue, helping the Man of Steel glimpse his home planet, Krypton. The scene is poignant: Superman observes the planet just in time to witness the explosion that devastated it shortly after his birth.

When DC Comics approached Tyson to allow his likeness to appear in the issue, he didn't just sign off and go on with his day. He worked with the writers on the storyline and ended up identifying a real-life star that could serve as the basis for Krypton's sun, called Rao in the comic book series.

On Thursday morning, Tyson invited a few reporters to his office at the American Museum of Natural History to explain how he "found" Superman's home solar system—and why he thought it was worth doing. Here's Tyson on how the conversation with DC Comics went down:

    So Superman is in our present, but always the same age [according to DC Comics]. Well how old is he? They say late twenties. It's a little nebulous there, late twenties. Well, if he comes to the Hayden Planetarium and observes the death of Krypton from an actual star, that star will have an actual distance. And if it has an actual distance, it tells us exactly how old Superman is.
    So my task, at their request—well actually, they didn't even know how to ask this. They just said, "Could we just show this?" And I said, "Sure you could show it. Why don't I get you an actual star?" They didn't even know that maybe we could do that. There are star catalogues. Let me see if there's a star that is late-twenty-something light-years away. Then it would have taken twenty-something years for its light to get here. Superman is twenty-something years old. He sees the destruction. ...
    So there's a huge effort that's been going on for the past several decades to catalog the nearby stars in the night sky. So I look at the nearby catalogs, and I find a star that's 27 light-years away. That's a nice, virile age for Superman to be. And it is an M-dwarf. It's red. So was Superman's home star! His home star, which I would learn in my conversations with them, has a name: It's Rao. It's red. So we got a red star at the right distance. So—[slaps hands three times as if brushing off dirt]—got that done. Then we said, alright, we bring him here in a wormhole—[slaps hands again]—got that done. So one by one we are assembling the scientific foundation for their storytelling.

The correspondence isn't perfect. Rao's real-life counterpart, called LHS-2520, probably doesn’t actually have any planets. If it did, they would be too dim for our telescopes to spy. And if it had a planet whose years lasted as many days as Krypton's do, that planet's distance from Rao would likely make it inhospitably frigid. (To account for this, Tyson posits that Krypton is geologically active, which could help to explain why it blew up.)

Regardless, it's pretty cool that generations of Superman fans can now point to the speck in the night sky from which the superhero originated. It's within a small constellation called Corvus, which is visible from the Southern Hemisphere (or the Northern Hemisphere's lower latitudes at the right time of year) with a high-powered backyard telescope.

This isn't the first time Tyson has injected genuine astronomy into a fictional work: He also goaded James Cameron into changing the night sky near the end of Titanic to more accurately represent the star field that Rose would have seen that night.

So why would a real-life astrophysicist take the trouble to flesh out make-believe stories? Tyson offered a couple of reasons. One is that he feels artists often avoid scientific detail out of fear that it will constrain their creativity, when it's more often the opposite, in his experience: When it comes to space, truth tends to be stranger—and more fascinating—than fiction.

The other reason struck me as even more compelling. Tyson has long been a vocal critic of NASA budget cuts, arguing that America's space program has immeasurable positive spillover effects on the nation's economy. Not least of those, in his mind, is its capacity to inspire wonder and scientific curiosity in the country's children. At the height of NASA's Apollo program, Tyson says, "You didn't need special programs to get people interested in STEM fields. You needed programs to manage the vast numbers of people who were interested." Kids were so excited about science you practically had to hold them back.

Tyson is all for today's commercialized space exploration efforts, but he doubts that the free market will ever produce expeditions as risky, groundbreaking, and awe-inspiring as those that the government could sponsor. From Ferdinand and Isabella backing Columbus to NASA putting men on the moon, he says, "Governments have always taken the first steps into the unknown." With NASA ever more constrained, Tyson sees it as part of his mission to keep young people excited about the worlds beyond ours in any way he can. He’s not Superman—he jokes that he had to ask the strip's illustrators to "shave a few pounds off" when they portrayed him in the comic—but his quest has a heroic element nonetheless.

"Cosmos"...it's back with a new host--Neil deGrasse Tyson

Popular science via "Cosmos" will return with a new outfit...more CGI, that is.

"Cosmos Will Get a Sequel Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson"

by

Email Author

August 5th, 2011

Wired

More than three decades after it aired, Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking, brilliant 13-part TV series Cosmos:A Personal Voyage will finally get a sequel.

Cosmos, which originally ran in 1980 and was rerun many times over the following decade, is widely regarded as one of the first, and best, TV shows to make science accessible to everyone. You can watch the show now on Hulu, but despite its brilliance it is still a show from more than 30 years ago, and you can tell — the special effects are primitive by today’s standards, but more importantly some of the content has been superseded by discoveries in the intervening years.

So, it’s high time someone made a sequel to it, and now someone is! In partnership with Sagan’s colleagues Ann Druyan (who is also his widow) and Steven Soter, Seth MacFarlane — yes, that Seth MacFarlane — is going to produce a new 13-part series to serve as a sequel and modern update to Sagan’s masterpiece.

Taking over the hosting duties will be none other than well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has served as host of NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS for the past five years, so he has plenty of experience making science accessible to the general public. It would be difficult to think of anyone who would be better able to succeed the late, great Carl Sagan.

The folks working on it will take their time and do it right — it’s not scheduled to air until sometime in 2013.

The producers of the show say the new series will tell “the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time.” They go on to boast: “It will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.”

That’s the good news. The bad — or at least, potentially bad — news is that, because of MacFarlane’s involvement, the series will air in prime time, and on Fox.

Now, in one way I’m all for showing it in prime time on a major network, because it’ll be that much more likely that people who routinely ignore the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel and, yes, PBS will actually see it.

I’m less thrilled, though, that it will have to compete with other, more mainstream prime-time shows — and it’ll be on Fox, which doesn’t have the greatest track record for giving shows a chance to pull their ratings up once they go down.

Now, maybe the fact that MacFarlane is involved — and Joss Whedon isn’t — will help. I certainly hope so.

Astronomers and public perception

Abstract:

Society's view of astronomers has changed over time and from culture to culture. This review discusses some of the many ways that astronomers have been perceived by their societies and suggests ways that astronomers can influence public perception of ourselves and our profession in the future.

Michael J. West's "Public Perception of Astronomers: Revered, Reviled and Ridiculed" .

Use this blog's search engine with any of the following names: Ralph Alpher, Robert Stawell Ball, Herber Curtis, Arthur Eddington, Galileo Galilei, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, Stephen Hawking, Percival Lowell, Carl Sagan, Harlow Shapley, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

"Living popular scientist" poll

Who is your choice for living "popular" scientist?

Brian Greene...0
Freeman Dyson...3
Lawrence Krauss...0
Neil deGrasse Tyson...2
Stephen Hawking...3

Somewhat surprised. I suppose Hawking would lead...he is quite an icon. I expected Krauss to be at the bottom...claim to fame mostly with the physics of "Star Trek". But I did think that Greene would be favored with his "Elegant Universe" material. Tyson may have shot himself in the foot with the Pluto statement. Dyson is for older individuals expressing a little more wisdom.

Brian Greene:

"Put a Little Science in Your Life"...please

Freeman Dyson:

A birthday celebration today-- Freeman Dyson...#85

Freeman Dyson--optimist

Lawrence Krauss:

Krauss & Jeremijenko on a date and discuss science

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Neil deGrasse Tyson...new representative

Neil deGrasse Tyson..."NOVA scienceNow"--2nd season

Pluto, Tyson, CNN lecture

"The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tyson, Weintraub, Tombaugh & Pluto

Tyson's interview with "Time" on Pluto and planets

Stephen Hawking:

Another review of Stephen and Lucy Hawking's children's book

"George's Secret Key to the Universe"--Stephen Hawking & daughter Lucy

Hawking, Einstein, Africa

Hawking--England or Canada...makes no difference

Job application...Lucasian professor of mathematics

Peter Higgs vs Stephen Hawking

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics

S. Hawking documentary

S. Hawking to Canada

Stephen Hawking's warnings

Space exploration?...Stephen Hawking's perspective

Stephen Hawking..."Master of the Universe"--documentary


Popularization of science

Pluto, Tyson, CNN lecture

From CNN:

"The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet"

Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the controversy over re-classifying Pluto as a comet. New York's American Museum of Natural History, where this talk was held, was the first public institution to adopt this position.

About 1-1/2 hours.

Pluto


"Naming Pluto"--a film

Pluto="Plutoid"

"Pluto a planet" poll

Pluto...a reader's contribution

Pluto not fitting definition

"The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tyson, Weintraub, Tombaugh & Pluto

Tyson's interview with "Time" on Pluto and planets

What's in a name?--Pluto

Thanks to stringer Tim for the link.

Tyson, Weintraub, Tombaugh & Pluto

Clyde Tombaugh

Alan Boyle, MSNBC's science reporter, discusses Neil deGrasse Tyson's book The Pluto Files and David Weintraub's book Is Pluto a Planet? There is also an interview with Clyde Tombaugh [including video clips].

MSNBC


Tyson's interview with "Time" on Pluto and planets

Tyson's interview with "Time" on Pluto and planets

Neil deGrasse Tyson replies to Time questions regarding Pluto, planets, and his book The Pluto Files.

"Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson"

by

Gilbert Cruz

January 21st, 2009

Time

Once a planet, now a dwarf, Pluto has lodged itself in the American consciousness for three-quarters of a century. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, explores the little guy's allure in his new book The Pluto Files. He talked to TIME about demoting a planet, how he became one of America's best-known scientists and how science will fare in the Obama Administration.

Why in the world do Pluto-philes, which you make a pun on in your book title, even exist? What's so special about Pluto?

All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet. Once you investigate that, you find out that Disney's dog Pluto was sketched the same year the cosmic object was discovered. And Pluto was discovered by an American. So here you have a recipe for Americans falling in love with a planet that really is just a tiny ice ball.

How did it get to be a planet in the first place?

There were high expectations that there was a planet of commensurate mass and size to Uranus and Neptune, orbiting behind Neptune. Scientists saw the path of Neptune around the sun, and they saw that it wasn't quite following Newton's laws of gravity. And so either Newton was wrong — though he'd been right for hundreds of years, so why assume that — or there was some other mass out there that they hadn't catalogued yet that was influencing the motion of Neptune. So that was the famous Planet X. And eventually, Clyde Tombaugh in Arizona discovered a planet, which got named Pluto. Not by an American, though, because an American would never have named it after a highly advertised, highly marketed laxative of the same name that was popular then.

So when did we figure out that Pluto is actually pretty miniscule?

What you do is, you look at the sky chart of stars and find the day when Pluto moves to intersect the light of a star. You set up observers across the earth and you each get a different angle of view of Pluto intersecting the light of a star. And when you do this, you can actually map the size of an object in the solar system. Here's what happened. They said, "OK, here's a star that's going to get really close, and Pluto is surely going to blot out the light of the star." Nope. The star just went right on by untouched. "Well, here's a closer passing one." Nothing. So for every star whose light was not blocked out, Pluto got smaller and smaller and smaller. People started getting suspicious in the 1970s and started thinking of it not as the ninth planet, but as one of the vagabonds of the solar system. It was smaller than Earth's moon. There are seven moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto. That doesn't bode well if you're trying to hang out in the ranks of planets.

You and your planetarium played a part in setting off this controversy. How did that come about?

We rebuilt the Hayden Planetarium between 1997 and 2000 at great expense. There was new science that needed to go in the facility and you want the most reliable, longest shelf-life science you can come up with. So I called in a panel of experts on the status of Pluto. And by the end of the night, it was clear that Pluto's day was over and it was time to rethink the structure and the form of the outer solar system. Our exhibit was that way for a year, and nobody complained about it until it showed up in the New York Times, page one: "PLUTO'S NOT A PLANET? ONLY IN NEW YORK." That's when all hell broke loose and the hate mail started.

So, how much hate mail did you get?

Let me be a little more honest in the word choice there. People felt very strongly and chose sides, and most of the hate mail was in fun.

There wasn't any, "Stop talking smack about Pluto or I'm going to slash your tires"?

There were no threats of bodily harm. But there were tongue in cheek threats. And most of the schoolchildren were clearly disgruntled, pleading with me to put Pluto back where it belongs, as a planet.

What, then, is the criteria for a planet?

In our exhibits, we abandoned the word planet as a useful word completely. We don't organize by planet status. We organize by what objects look like compared to what other objects look like. So we look at the family photo of the solar system, and in it, you have the sun, which obviously is its own thing. Then you have the terrestrials — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, all small, all rocky, all dense. Then you have the asteroid belt — craggy chunks of rock and metal — orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Tens of thousands of them, likely hundreds of thousands of them. Then you have Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They're all big, all bulbous, all gaseous, they have rings, they all have many moons. That's a group of objects.

So when people say, "How many planets are there now?" I say, that's the wrong question. Do not distract yourself over the answer to that question because that question contains no science. Now I am partly to blame, as an educator, because to third graders you teach the planets in sequence, and books celebrate this, and kids boast about memorizing planet names, thinking that they've accomplished something. But it would be much more effective intellectually if you tell me what Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars have in common. Or why they are different. That's a much more useful scientific inquiry than the recitation of planets in sequence.

Other non-Pluto comments here .


"The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

"The Pluto Files" by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Pluto Files

by

Neil deGrasse Tyson

ISBN-10: 0393065200
ISBN-13: 978-0393065206

Well, Mr. Tyson may be stepping on some toes here.

A review by Manuela Hoelterhoff, "Pluto's Enemy Speaks; Lady Comet Hunter: Manuela Hoelterhoff", appeared at Bloomberg.com .


"Naming Pluto"--a film

Pluto="Plutoid"

What's in a name?--Pluto

Neil deGrasse Tyson..."NOVA scienceNow"--2nd season

Neil deGrasse Tyson
[cool jacket]

Since the death of Carl Sagan, a vacuum was left when it came to popularizing science, but there are new individuals on the horizon. There is Brian Greene and now Neil deGrasse Tyson [Astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium, New York City] who hosted NOVA's four part "Origins". Like Greene, Tyson is quite qualified academically and has a fine smooth persona of presentation. His on camera presentations are flawless and professional and avoid the pedantic. The "voice overs" are clear and carry the pipes of a professional radio personality/announcer. Neither Greene nor Tyson, as of yet, has achieved the status of "charm" that Sagan had, but they nevertheless do a fine job in popularizing science. Tyson's recent venture has been PBS's "NOVA scienceNow" beginning it's second season this evening on most PBS stations. Take a look.


"NOVA scienceNow"

Neil deGrasse Tyson's home page with biography and selected papers

Two "Cybercity" audio interviews with Jack Landman


As Neil Tyson said about "Origins":

"Origins" "Is the attempt to bring to the public, really for the very first time, a synthesis of all the branches of science that have relevance to answering the question, 'What is the origin of our place in the cosmos?'"

NOVA's "Origins":

Episode One: "Earth is Born"
Episode Two: "How Life Began"
Episode Three: "Where Are the Aliens?"
Episode Four: "Back to the Beginning"

Transcripts

NOVA's "Origins" home page is full of cool things to do and read:

"Origins"

Neil deGrasse Tyson...new representative

A few nights ago the local PBS station began to rebroadcast NOVA's four part series called Origins that attempted to explain the origins of the solar system with emphasis on Earth. Like the majority of these type of programs of popularization of science it provided all the "bells and whistles" that a computer could generate for illustration. I lost count...how many comets and asteroids were depicted hitting the Earth? Nevertheless, the host was a good choice. Neil deGrasse Tyson exhibits enthusiasm and skill in presentation. There were two interesting items: The formation of the moon and the possibility of Earth's water delivered by nearby icy comets. The former includes an interesting hypothesis by William K. Hartman; that the Earth was struck some 4.5 billion years ago by solar system forming debris where the debris was absorbed and a large chunk was displaced--the moon. And that the gravitational interactions of the two plus the initial collision force tilted the Earth's axis--thus the seasons. Hartman has deduced that the Moon was quite closer at one time and is slowly moving away. [Maybe this will be more of a concern than being hit by an asteroid or alien invasion.] The Earth's water origin hypothesis is interesting too; that local comets of ice struck Earth's surface, vaporized, and eventually condensed into areas of liquid water. Interesting to note is the emphasis on "local comets" for the water on Earth contains very little "heavy water" content which is not common in nearby comets and quite common in very distant comets. Overall, a series worth watching.

Since the death of Carl Sagan, a vacuum was left when it came to popularizing science, but there are new individuals on the horizon. There is Brian Greene and now Neil deGrasse Tyson [Astrophysicist and Director of the Hayden Planetarium, New York City]. Like Greene, Tyson is quite qualified academically and has a fine smooth persona of presentation. His on camera presentations are flawless and professional and avoid the pedantic. The "voice overs" are clear and carry the pipes of a professional radio personality/announcer. Neither Greene nor Tyson, as of yet, has achieved the status of "charm" that Sagan had, but they nevertheless do a fine job in popularizing science. And he will be hosting the second season of NOVA Science Now in the Spring of 2008.

As Neil Tyson said about Origins:

Origins is the attempt to bring to the public, really for the very first time, a synthesis of all the branches of science that have relevance to answering the question, 'What is the origin of our place in the cosmos?'

Transcripts:

"Earth is Born"

"How Life Began"

"Where Are the Aliens?"

"Back to the Beginning"


Neil deGrasse Tyson's home page with biography and selected papers

NOVA's Origins

The Origin of the Moon


Popularization of science


Book:

The Origin of the Moon [Papers presented at the Conference on the Origin of the Moon, held in Kona, Hawaii, October 1984]

edited by

W.K. Hartmann, R.J. Phillips, G. J. Taylor

ISBN 0-942862-03-1