Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Well, not quite everything but a lot of stuff anyway as rockstar astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses the origins of the solar system, the recent IAU debate on planets, and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and more in this extended-play edition of the Center For Inquiry's podcast Point of Inquiry. We've already had our obligatory reading this weekend so I'm making this your obligatory listening (MP3).
If you think any of these topics are boring then you've never listened to Neil deGrasse Tyson before who is perhaps one of the most entertaining and literate scientists since Carl Sagan. As well as being the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Dr. Tyson is the author of The Sky is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist; and also Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, co-written with Donald Goldsmith.
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He certainly has a way with explaining some very difficult concepts in some very easy to understand language while making it entertaining at the same time.
For example, when talking about intelligent design, Tyson talks about his idea of "stupid design" - yes, some things are designed well, but some other things are designed rather poorly. He mentions "the stuff going on between our legs" in that we have a "sewage system mixed up with an entertainment system". Priceless.
He's definitely the intellectual heir to Asimov, Feynman and Sagan. Very entertaining. The bit you mentioned had me laughing out loud.
The other bit I really liked, and a topic I haven't really paid attention to, was his discussion of what classifies as a planet and how we teach about the planets to get kids (and hopefully adults) more interested. The IAU's new classification system, which basically says if an object has a powerful enough gravitational field to pull its' mass into a rounded shape then it's a planet, promotes a non-helpful model of the solar system where teachers essentially focus on an enumeration of planets. We had 9 planets, now we've got 12. Woo hoo! Now we can do a planet a month. But what happens when you get to 30 planets, which under the new IAU classification is likely.
While Tyson supports the IAU's attempt to codify the definition of a planet because previously there really wasn't any formal definition (I didn't know that!) what he would rather concentrate on is grouping the planets by the characteristics they share. So for instance, all the gas giants would go together, all the Kuiper Belt Objects would go together, and all the iron-nickle core planets would go together. Then you can focus on talking about much more important things than just memorizing the names of the planets, how far out from the sun they are (which is quite variable when you get to highly elliptical orbits) and some basic facts. I agree, it's a much better way of doing it.
BTW: For anyone who's interested, the Hayden Planetarium has a 3-D atlas of the Universe for download.
But I've heard it's a very entertaining spot so I think I'll have to hunt that down (yeah, I know, it's on Comedy Central's site, but that takes all the fun out of it).
What I mean when I compare Tyson to Sagan is that he shares many of the same characteristics as Sagan. A very smart man who is passionate about science, wants to share that passion and his knowledge with everyone, and is talented at communicating to non-scientists about science.
