Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Smartest Man on TV
Neil deGrasse Tyson has a slogan for his StarTalk TV show that he isn’t allowed to use. “It’s ‘Learn something for a change,'” he says with a laugh. “Our marketing people think it’s offensive. But I still think: ‘Learn something for a change!'”
As an astrophysicist, author, lecturer, and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, Tyson has spent a career trying to turn the rest of the country into fellow science geeks. As America’s go-go spaceman, he’s hosted his StarTalk podcast, radio show and now TV series, along with Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, the recent update of Carl Sagan’s iconic series. Along the way, the 56-year-old, New York-born Tyson has become a regular target for conservative media. The National Review dubbed him “the fetish and totem of the extraordinarily puffed-up ‘nerd’ culture that has of late started to bloom across the United States.” (“White liberal nerds love this guy so much, he could defecate on them…and they would dance in the streets,” opined one Fox News commentator.) “I’m not really who they’re after,” Tyson says, waving off the “smarter than thou” tag applied to him. “They’ve tried to create an easy target. But at the end of the day, I’m not the person they want to apply those comments to.”
Indeed, Tyson remains his own, always opinionated and sometimes unpredictable self. “Resist the Hype,” he Tweeted about the recent “Blood Moon” eclipse. “The size of today’s ‘Super’ moon is to next month’s full moon as a 16.07 inch pizza is to a 16.00 inch pizza.” On October 25th, StarTalk returns for a second season on the National Geographic Channel, and again Tyson has recruited everyone from Bill Clinton to David Byrne, David Crosby and Seth MacFarlane to lure in the science-averse among us.
Since we’re talking about a TV show: As a child of the Sixties, you must have grown up watching Star Trek and Lost in Space.
Yes. But with Lost in Space, I could never get around the fact that they’re in a flying saucer that’s spinning, but they can stand in it and look out the window and see everything. I said, “No, I’m not buying this — the scene should be spinning by!” So that was not one of my favorites. I was a mild Star Trek fan, but my favorite show then and now is The Twilight Zone. Especially the episode called “The Invaders.”
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