Andy Fitzpatrick

Battle Creek Enquirer

If you're planning on a night out, what better way to spend it than with an astrophysicist?

Scientist, TV show host and podcaster Neil deGrasse Tyson will appear Tuesday at Western Michigan University's Miller Auditorium.

Tyson, who is also the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, is known for his enthusiastic and forward promotion of science education. In 2014, he followed in the footsteps of Carl Sagan when he updated "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" for a new audience. He also hosts "StarTalk Radio" which inspired National Geographic Channel's "StarTalk" show.

In a conversation with the Enquirer Monday, Tyson talked about what happens at his presentations, the public's appreciation of science and what the deal was with his recent tweet about sex, pain and extinction. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

The Enquirer: How’s the tour going?

Tyson: "Tour doesn’t say it right. There’s a consistent appetite for the universe that I serve. A city says we’d like to have Neil Tyson come, and then what I typically do is I offer the host or the organizer a set of topics they can pick from. It might be as many as one or two dozen different talk titles. I think 15 is the number.

"Then they pick one, whatever is the mood of the host or what they think their audience would want, and then that’s the talk that I give. Of course, it’s shaped to fit the time and the location and the audience, and this sort of thing. But in terms of topics, that’s what I do. So in that sense, it’s not quite a tour."

Are there topics that commonly emerge that people want to know more about?

"There’s an interesting distinction between what is a commonly requested topic vs. a topic that they don’t necessarily know to ask for, but at the end they really liked it. Everyone likes to hear the latest discoveries, so that’s a topic. It’s called 'This Just In: The Latest Discoveries in the Universe.' But typically, if I’m going to a city that has a university, there will be physics professors there, or astrophysics departments, that sort of thing, where you don’t need me to talk about latest discoveries. I can do it, but you can get a local person to do that because we all have equal access to the latest discoveries.

"Where the talks become a little more sort of uniquely constructed is where I bring to bear on the topic all of my life experience, just in interacting with the public, interacting with Washington, with NASA, with politics, with religion.

"So one such topic, which is the topic of this coming talk, is called the cosmic perspective. So you wouldn’t know necessarily in advance that you might be interested in that. But that one turns out to be a perennial favorite to people. I take you, and I put you in the universe, small, alone…(laughs).

It sounds very inviting.

"I know. I dismantle your ego and put it in a whole other cosmic perspective. But I build it back up again, but not in a way where you leave thinking you’re in the middle of the universe. You leave thinking you’re part of the universe. That’s a different kind of ego."

Does that perspective surprise people when they see for the first time how small our perception of the universe is?

"I think that word surprise doesn’t do justice to what impact it has. I would say they’re stupefied in some cases. That’s a better word than surprised. Stupefied how small we are in time and space and our location, in our chemical composition is not even unusual in the universe. There’s things that I convey to you that highlight these facts.

"In this particular talk, I’ll also spend time exploring where on Earth and who on Earth had the luxury of time and culture to discover cosmic perspectives. It’s not everybody and it’s not at all times. So that’s just an interesting geopolitical exploration that we spend some time on as well."

Where do you see our acceptance of science education right now? Sometimes you see a column or something saying it’s hopeless for the future.

"It’s hopeless for the future. (Laughter) No, I’m never without hope. I think there are very good signs and signals that the pendulum is shifting - I don’t want to call it a pendulum because that implies it will just keep swinging back and forth. That the forces have shifted.

"It’s not only things I have experienced directly. Such as, I wake up every morning saying, 'How is it that I have 5 million Twitter followers?' There’s something wrong there. How did that happen? I feel like alerting people. 'Do you realize I’m an astrophysicist? Did you start following me by accident?'

"So that is real, and it’s more than just the geekosphere that is in that community who follow what I post. What I post is sort of observations of life and the universe through the lens that I carry as an educator and a scientist. But if that were it alone, I don’t think I could be justified in declaring there are forces shifting.

"There are other elements. For example, the Facebook page, IFLS. I have nothing to do with that page and it’s got 15 million more, it’s way more, people than who follow me on Twitter. It’s an aggregator that posts interesting science tidbits that show up all around the world and you’re just one click away.

"Other things, such as how many incarnations of 'CSI' exist right now? These shows, people don’t think about it this way, but it’s really true, portray scientists who are young, and attractive and have fully fleshed-out characters. And you look at that say, OK, they’re just another character on a show. Until you go back 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and you’ll see the scientist is not the person you want to be, they’re the wire-haired, lab coat-donning person behind the slab. The cool people go to them to find out how the world is going to end or how to solve a problem, but then they leave.

"You don’t care. Are they married? Do they have kids? Are they sad that day? Are they happy? All the normal human emotion has not historically been granted to scientists as portrayed in pop culture. But now that is the case in, for example, 'CSI.'

"There’s also that show 'Scorpion,' which are young, geeky problem solvers who work for the Department of Homeland Security. And they use their intelligence, and their wit and their IT savvy to solve problems, with physics and math and this sort of thing.

"And 'Cosmos.' 'Cosmos' aired in prime time."

On Fox!

"And not in the little channels up on the dial, but on Fox on a Sunday night. Where else are you on a Sunday night? You’re at home. So all of these factors tell me that the country is ready for a shift in how science is treated as a topic. It’s not something to be avoided and then chuckle about how poorly you did in it in school. It’s a topic to be respected.

"It doesn’t mean you have to be a scientist, but you can respect and even enjoy it, enjoy the fruits of discovery. You guys probably did this in your paper, too; I didn’t force you guys to make headlines when the Higgs boson was discovered, or when the gravity wave was discovered. I bet that was on your page one. Did I call you up and say you must expose this physics to the world? No. You read the public on your own and you recognize that’s going to be a fun cover story."

On "StarTalk," you’ve got the comedian co-hosts such as Chuck Nice and Eugene Mirman. Were they on board right away with the idea?

"At the beginning, it’s a quick payday for them. They come into the studio and have fun.

"By the way, we’re always looking for comedians and this medium is not necessarily the best format for all comedians, even if a comedian is amazing as a stand-up on stage. For example, they have to recognize when the flow of a subject is where good information is coming out so they know when to pull back. They have to look for when things are slowing down, or there’s a little lull, or maybe it’s getting a little too NPR-ish. Then they come in with some reflections of levity to bring it back to a program where you smile often.

"We’re cultivating some new comedians for this. Maeve Higgins is from Ireland and has remarkably clever, perceptive comments about American culture and what we do here.

"And the comedians as far as I can tell enjoy it because, like I said, it’s relatively easy for them to come up to the studio and have fun. But also, they learn something and the public sees that you can have fun with science. You can have grown up fun with science, not just making a baking soda volcano."

Which, by the way, I did just a few weeks ago with my daughter.

"OK, all right!"

On "StarTalk," you interview famous people about how science has impacted their lives. So I wanted to flip it and ask how you like doing the job of a journalist. What’s been interesting to you about interviewing other people?

"Typically the interviewer is a journalist and I’m the scientist. So the difference here is that a journalist is there to ask questions, and then the questions get answered. And they might ask a counter question, and they’re playing the role of the person in public who’s reading the article or observing the interview.

"That’s not actually what I’m doing. Yes, I’m asking questions, but I also in many cases have fluency in their expertise. So I know where I want to drive the car. I have a steering wheel. I’m driving it in a place where these are not just blind answers coming to just whatever question I can come up with. These are questions that are driving answers that fulfill sort of a science learning curve for every show. That’s the goal at its best. That’s what I think we accomplish.

"In a way, it’s the conversation that I would have with them if we were just at a bar. If they’re an expert in something I’m not an expert in, which is most of the time, I’m just curious. A journalist wouldn’t have the position to do that. Their line of questioning would be purer in that sense. They would let the conversation go where it does, rather than steer it to a place where you know in advance would bring out a cool scientific insight.

"So that’s different. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just chilling."

On your social media, there have been a couple of instances that were interesting recently. I’m thinking of the whole flat Earth thing with rapper B.o.B, and over the weekend your tweet about if a species had pain during sex, it would have gone extinct. What do you make of that environment for putting out messages based on science and how people receive them?

"I didn’t put out a message with regard to the flat Earth. I was responding. So normally I don’t engage people who have a four-century old outlook on our place in the universe. Normally I don’t do that.

"So why did I do it in this case? Well, there are several reasons, but only one of them was the tipping point. So here are the reasons.

"B.o.B has more than 2 million Twitter followers. So what he posts has huge exposure. Did he earn 2 million Twitter followers by saying the Earth is flat? No, he earned 2 million Twitter followers because he’s a popular hip hop artist.

"So that’s why he’s that big. But now that he’s that big, he’s using it to then say these other things. Fine. In a free country, do what you want. But apparently, in the Venn diagram of who follows B.o.B and who follows me, there are sufficient number of people who when he started posting flat earth tweets, they started crying out to me, saying, 'Dr. Tyson, please, save him from himself. Look what he’s doing. Can you set him straight?'

"So these were clearly fans of his. There was a crying out for me to do something. Even that wouldn't have done it. What did it is I went to look at his tweets and in the descriptions of the photos he was posting, he said, 'I used physics and math to prove Earth is flat.'

"Well, those are fightin’ words right there, OK? He’s saying he’s using physics and math, and that’s misleading the public using something that if, in fact, he used the physics and math correctly, he would get the right answer and not the wrong answer.

"So I put in four tweets or so rebutting his claims and then making a general statement saying just because his mind is set in the 15th century doesn’t mean people can’t still like his music. In a free country, he can think what he wants. It’s just dangerous if you think what you want, and you’re wrong and you have influence over others.

"With regard to the sex, that was interesting because some biologists jumped on me claiming that it’s just false. And people love nothing more, apparently, in revealing or finding that I’ve said something that’s wrong. Now, so do I. I take great joy in finding if I said something wrong, because then I’ve learned something.

"But what happened in the case of the sex hurting and the species going extinct, biologists and people were quick to say, 'Oh, he should stick to astrophysics.' Well, why? Oh, because there are species where sex hurts and is quite painful.

"There is a woman who has a blog (Emily Willingham, writing at www.forbes.com), who wrote a whole thing giving examples of painful sex. And in every single case, it was describing the pain of one of the partners in sex, not both.

"In another case, she was describing the praying mantis. The female praying mantis, after they mate, bites the head off the male. But was it enjoyable up to that point? Right? She doesn’t bit the head off before they mate!

"So yes, of course, there are situations that are painful. So I wrote back to her. She said, 'Clearly he doesn’t know all these cases,' but of course I knew all those cases. What I don’t know, and maybe they’ve put it out there, I’m looking for a case where both parties to a sexual encounter experience pain. Because if only one experiences pain, that doesn’t prevent reproduction. Because it could be so pleasurable for the other party that, who cares? They just go on in.

"If they exist, great. Tell me. I’ll put them in my list. But nobody’s come forth with that yet."

This seems like a microcosm of science-

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! The bigger point is, it became a whole Internet thing, right? CNN talked about it. Cool! People arguing about science. I love it."

So will there be a future "StarTalk" episode about this?

"(Laughs) If the precision of what I asked for here is sufficient so that in fact it always feels good to at least one party — by the way, I don’t talk about feeling good, I just talk about if it hurts — if one feels compelled to do it whether or not one feels good, and the other is, it hurts, then it will still happen, clearly. That was never the question.

"What will be interesting to me is if they can’t find such a species, then OK, glad that all of this got put out there, but will people say, 'Tyson’s actually right.' Because they jumped all over the fact that in these cases one of the partners feels pain.

"So it’s an interesting thing. I think the takeaway here is, people are having bar fights over science and that’s a good thing."

My last question: Are we actually in a giant snow globe?

"(Laughs) Maybe it’s a little snow globe."

You raised the issue on Twitter, so I had to ask.

"I know. I’m guilty. I don’t really think so, but sometimes I wonder.

"There are outdoor parties now where you can get your picture taken inside a snow globe. Have you seen that? Look up party snow globes. They’re 20 feet in diameter and they’re air-supported and they blow snow inside of it. You can bounce up and down and there’s a photographer outside and will take a picture of you actually in it.

"I didn’t say that I think about it all the time or that I’m doing research on it. It’s just that sometimes I wonder (laughs)."

Contact Andy Fitzpatrick at 269-966-0697 or afitzpatrick@battlecreekenquirer.com. Follow him on Twitter: @am_fitzpatrick

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