Pluto has a valid point. Neil is a grifter who’s made it his entire job to talk down to people.
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.
I dunno. I'm grumpy today and need more coffee.
I wanted to like him too but the more I tried the more I came to the same conclusions as you. I’m saying this post-coffee and happily houred.
He’s absolutely no Carl Sagan. Now, those are some big shoes to fill for anyone but Neil didn’t even come close. I really like his voice but there’s always an air of condescension about his demeanor. It was admittedly less present in Cosmos, thankfully.
His Hollyweird presence is what really irks me, appearing in shows like Big Bang Theory. He somehow manages to be bad at acting like himself. It would be almost impressive if he didn’t come off as so damn conceited.
But.....mirrors...
The "cleared its orbit" requirement is too arbitrary and non-scientific. We should've gone the other direction and classified more objects as planets.
Feels like we can agree to disagree on that one but I hope we can all agree that Neil deGrasse Tyson is fucking annoying.
While we can disagree on the latter portion, the first sentence is simply fact. The IAU does not provide any guidelines based on quantifiable data for this requirement.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood
I like him.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
well yeah it's quite readily admitted to be non-scientific, scientists generally just use "celestial object" afaik.
Then we'd have several hundred to a few thousand planets and need a new term for the larger celestial objects anyway. Seems silly. Planet is already arbitrary.
Unironically this
I'm glad Neil DeGrasse Tyson is so universally reviled by people who actually care about science..
Honestly asking one's opinion on him is enough to tell who is interested by science and who "totally loves science bro"
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.
The people who "Fucking love science" are just another flavor of anti Intellectual
Probably the saddest kind. The ones in denial
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