It’s so refreshing to hear this. Even when I was less educated, his smugness annoyed me SO MUCH that it made me feel like “If actual cosmologists are like this, I couldn’t stand them anyway.” It made science and the community feel very unattractive, since his marketing puts him all over the place where the tag “science” appears.
He talks like a fedora-sporting moderator from a ~2006 atheist-reason-rational-skeptics-or-else forum. As if he personally has already unlocked all the secrets of the universe and if your sci-fi movie isn’t perfectly adhering to known science you’re an absolute buffoon.
Sadly Bill Nye seems kinda similar, and I even got to meet him in person. He was rather irked that people wanted to get pictures and autographs with him long before the symposium even started. (Despite being lauded as a hero by countless inquisitive children and all)
TL;DR: Despite the unrelenting tide of anti-intellect, I’m glad there’s a lot of serious scientists who aren’t just in it to lord it over everybody else.
I admit I want to like his science education efforts, but … and I mean this in just an objective way and it’s only my opinion but … he just doesn’t click for me anywhere close to how Carl Sagan did. Sagan had such a thoughtful, reflective and soothing manner in how he presented science concepts, and his awe and love of all things science (and science history) was infectious. The original Cosmos is capable of making one weep at the beauty of the universe… I only got through the first 2 or 3 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new series; his style of narration just doesn’t work for me. I even have trouble listening to his science podcasts, it’s just too much ‘sports-talk’ like back and forth.
Add comment