In 1995, I first interviewed Bill Nye the children’s educator/entertainer. His TV show was such a hit that 10,000 kids and parents showed up at the Ontario Science Centre for a day of The Science Guy’s seminars.

These days, Bill Nye is still the Science Guy, but he’s devoting himself to educating adults – with mixed results.

His “performance” Dec. 4 at Toronto’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre is, “not for little kids I guess,” he says in a phone interview. “It’s college-age kids, grown-ups. I’m going to talk with questions-and-answers for two hours. And you can get some squirming kids in two hours.

“But it’s a show. We have science demonstrations, audience participation, a little video edited for hilarious comedic effect, and so on.”

His more controversial seminars for adults have involved audiences that more or less reject science entirely. Back in February, Nye, whose slogan is, “Science rules!,” debated evolution in Petersburg, Ky., with Ken Ham, the CEO of the Young Earth Creationist Ministry, in a debate that streamed to three million people.

A lot of people in the science world, including Neil deGrasse Tyson – “a dear friend of mine, I’ll see him this afternoon,” Nye says – objected to the debate, saying Nye shouldn’t have given the time of day to anyone who thinks the Earth is 10,000 years old.

“After the success of that debate, people like Neil and (American Museum of Natural History curator) Ian Tattersall have kind of come around. Neil still wouldn’t do it himself, but he now thinks what I did wasn’t such a bad thing.”

(One connection Nye and Tyson have is the late Carl Sagan, who mentored Tyson and taught astronomy to Nye at Cornell University).

In his own way, Nye says he’s enjoying this phase of his career as much as his kid-science days. “This fighting against Creationists is a hard job,” he says. “However, I felt great about how it went down in Kentucky, to tell you the truth. Exposing those people is really important. It’s important to the economic health of the U.S. if you raise a generation of people that doesn’t understand science, the country will suffer economically and in other ways.”

His message has obviously registered in many other quarters. He’s made appearances on The Big Bang Theory as himself (arch-enemy of TV scientist Prof. Proton, played by Bob Newhart). “Bill Brady (the show’s co-creator) has a great interest in science, a computer programmer who’s very fluent in accounting software. He was a developer for a while. Now he drives a Maserati.”

Rich he may be, but seen another way, Brady is just another longstanding fan. “I never quite got it at the time, the impact of The Science Guy show. But people come up to me constantly and say, ‘You’re the reason I’m a physician, or the reason I’m an engineer, or the reason I write software.’ It goes on and on, and it’s absolutely amazing.”

And in a roundabout way, they have the Challenger disaster to thank for it. Nye quit aerospace engineering not long after it, because he was disillusioned by the space program’s culture. “It was always ‘goodtogo,’ like it was one word, and of course it wasn’t.”

The private sector’s space attempts have also run aground lately – with the explosion of the Antares rocket in October, and the crash this month of Virgin Galactic’s sub-orbital passenger prototype.

Noting that there are billions of tax dollars involved in these projects, Nye says, “I was charmed in a miserable way when there were all these news stories about how people are going to give up on space after these disasters.

“They completely missed the point and they do not understand these people at all. When there’s a setback, they redouble their efforts, and they get even more serious about it.”

Twitter: @jimslotek

jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca