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Okay kids, time for science class


C.O.
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I LOVE him! Why couldn't I have him for a science teacher? His personality is so huge and he obviously adores his field. So many scientists, by contrast, look like they ran out of constipation medicine. When Jon Stewart interviewed him on The Daily Show, Neil pointedly announced that the show's background graphic of a spinning planet was spinning the wrong way (I always wondered about that). When he returned for a second interview, he brought Jon to task for not correcting it yet. I LOVE him. He had a cameo on the Big Bang Theory, too.

 

Baby Herc

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  • 4 weeks later...

Tyson is the "Preacher of Science," like if Martin Luther King, Jr. and Carl Sagan had a baby. I'd buy this guy a beer any day...but not an espresso!

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTyktUuC4g

 

I'm a huge fan of Richard Dawkins but I agree with Tyson on this one: if you don't know your audience, they won't hear your message.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxff0k_TEzI

 

Okay, this one is just effin' hilarious.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

On second thought, he's not my fav. He's too mentally stiff. I watched a dozen or so of his lectures and interviews and while the man has an obvious passion and zeal for science coming out of his pores, well, I'm wondering if that's all he's got. It's like he's holding a hammer and everything around him has become a nail. I think he might have hamstrung himself and cut himself off from a lot of quantum leaps of imagination and possibility due to his unswerving focus on only one method which he considers law. Science is NOT law, it's a flowing collective of perspectives that shifts and adjusts with each new idea. The science we have to date is groovy and all but it's literally only the tip of the iceberg and we're still way off about a lot of things because certain scientists don't want to give up their assumptions and their old measuring tools and methods--especially their methods of thinking. Einstein didn't fall for that crap and they laughed him out of the lecture hall...at first. Science is only as strong as it's embrace of its leading edge thinkers. And those thinkers leap ahead of current science by inventing a new one each time.

 

Anyway, yeah, Tyson is charismatic and that's great for lagging school programs but it gets annoying for us leading edge types. He's eager to wave his team flag around the room (Go, Science! Yay!) and that's great for rallying kids in the classroom who would otherwise be bored out of their skulls at the thought of pondering physics, but he comes off sounding like an obsessive-compulsive TV evangelist after awhile: "Science is the only truth and if you don't join me, you're going to roast in the firey hell of ignorance! Now, open your physics books to page one and read after me...First there was the Big Bang, and we saw that it was good."

 

Baby Herc

 

PS: The Big Bang Theory is a hypothesis that current science at the time invented to explain (read: wildly extrapolate) what little they knew about the origins of what they agreed to call the material universe. Ditto for Multiverse and Dark Matter. Don't worry, it will all change in a decade and we'll all have to buy new physics textbooks again. Ditto for the decade after that. And after that. (sigh)

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  • 2 weeks later...

To funny, I view him as fluid, bright, comprehensive, funny & passionate.

Most teachers appear stiff but if students going to learn then they

have to sit down, open their books & STFU.

 

That being said he is the one responsible for debunking Pluto.

--- Pluto will always be the 9th planet to me

http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/26/2903224/dr-neil-degrasse-tyson-killing-pluto-on-the-verge

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