Bill Nye the Pseudoscience Guy

Bill Nye

Bill Nye is a mechanical engineer who graduated in 1977 from Cornell where he enrolled in classes taught by Carl Sagan. After working for Boeing for several years, Nye migrated towards comedy and invented his popular character who hosted the syndicated PBS namesake children's science show. Following the success of his television series, Nye wrote two best selling books on science, rose to prominence as the CEO of the Planetary Society, and competed on Dancing with the Stars. Now, his Netflix series, Bill Nye Saves the World, continues to educate devoted fans through lighthearted comedic thespianism artfully crafted to explain the world around us. 

While hordes of nerds attribute their success in fields like engineering, medicine and astrophysics to their childhood patronage of Bill Nye The Science Guy, I watched Nye's shows collectively for less than a few minutes. I find him to be exceedingly tedious with all the goofy get ups and theatrical facial expressions. The show, itself, is downright painful with odd voice overs and jumpy cut scenes designed to speed up the more boring parts. My oldest son is a very tech savvy high schooler who loathed Bill Nye primarily because Aidan doesn't suffer from attention deficit disorder. Nye would repeatedly drive home a mundane point with statements like,

"The earth is big. Way big!"

Then he would demonstrate that if the earth was a grain of sand he held in tweezers, the sun would be the size of a grapefruit. He didn't just reveal how far away the grapefruit would be though. He held his hand a few inches from the tweezers, then asked,

"Would the sun be this far away?"

Of course not. After playing this game three more times, Bill finally let us all in on the titillating fact that the grapefruit would be 22 meters away. I know this is a character Bill plays, but a less goofy version of the science guy, complete with bowtie, has been appearing in the media, making all sorts of intellectual claims based on dubious scientific knowledge. Bill Nye is not really a scientist. He's an engineer. A college degree and a bowtie don't make you a scientist. Nye often says when arguing a point he feels he understands better than you based on his extensive scientific background,

"We in the science field..."

Nye won't be doing an intellectual ride along with Neil de Grasse Tyson anytime soon. A while ago Nye did an "ask me anything" on reddit in which he fielded a question about an interesting event in his life that affected him deeply. Nye said,

"I watched bumble bees (Hymentoptera bombidae) for hours. How could such a relatively big animal fly with such relatively small wings? The answer was discovered in my lifetime. Their abdomens are springs, and their halteres provide vortices with (sic) allow the wings to swing up with hardly any aerodynamic drag. If I may, how cool is that?"

An etymologist chimed in with,

"...hymenopterans don't have halteres. Those are specialized balancing structures limited to Diptera (flies). Hence di (two) ptera (wing). Hymenoptera still have all four wings, no balancing structures. Their muscles vibrate instead of contract to allow for extremely fast wing movement."

Can't argue with a bug guy. I guess when Bill was watching bumble bees for hours, he never actually thought of reading a book about them. At least he didn't say that scientists don't know how a bee is able to fly because clearly the etymologist who responded to Nye had his bees in a row. Okay, I'll spot Bill Nye this public flub since we all at some time in our life comment on something we know nothing about. A few years ago, Nye weighed in on abortion with a video entitled, Bill Nye: Can We Stop Telling Women What to Do With Their Bodies? Refuting the prolife stance that life begins at conception, Nye opened with,

"Many, many, many, many more hundreds of eggs are fertilized than become humans, ...but if you're going to hold that as a standard—that is to say, that when an egg is fertilized, it therefore has the same rights as a human, whom are you going to sue?"

Nye makes the point that fertilization is not enough. The egg must attach to the uterine wall before it can grow into a fetus. About half of fertilized eggs fail to do this. Most of the time only one egg is released per month so a woman does not discard hundreds of fertilized eggs naturally as Bill suggests. Nye also uses the term "womb" instead of uterus which had me thinking he made this clip for eight year olds. Although I'm not a lawyer nor a physicist, I suspect a neutrino went through Nye's head when he suggested you can sue a women for terminating a pregnancy. He can't possibly think right to lifers want to sue women whose bodies for whatever reason reject a fertilized egg, but Bill yanks in science by saying,

"It just reflects a deep lack of scientific understanding, and you... apparently literally don't know what you're talking about."

I'm glad that Bill Nye with his mechanical engineering degree could straighten out all those stupid people concerning this whole abortion issue. It took an unmarried, childless guy who is not a medical practitioner to explain the science behind procreation to the hordes of dumbasses in our society. I found it hard to listen to Nye explaining procreation especially when he used the term "sperm." The fact is Bill Nye is not the most masculine guy on Tinder. He was married once for seven weeks before the union was annulled, after which he filed a restraining order against his former spouse for stealing his laptop and dumping herbicide in his garden. Bill has to get back into the game of life. Even Stephen Hawkin got hitched twice.

When asked if he thought it was ok to jail climate skeptics as war criminals, Bill stated,

"Was it appropriate to jail the guys from Enron?"

Then he added,

"Was it appropriate to jail people from the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not addictive?"

The Enron guys who cooked the books to scam investors are being bitch slapped right now in Shawshank, but the cigarette executives who testified before congress that cigarettes were not addictive never went to prison. Bill continues,

"In these cases as a taxpayer and voter... the introduction of extreme doubt... about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen. So I can see where people are very concerned about this and are pursuing criminal investigations..."

Bill must be applauding the Italian courts manslaughter conviction in 2012 of six scientists and one civil defense officer over their failed prediction of the 2009 earthquake in l’Aquila that killed 309 people. The courts found the scientist and government official did not communicate the actual risk to the populus. The defendants were accused of giving "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" concerning minor tremors before the quake. Oddly, those are the exact adjectives which accurately describe the science of earthquake prediction.

Maybe we should call for the imprisonment of Bill Nye for his many misstatements. Something tells me Bill wouldn't survive the check in procedure at the county jail. Nye likes to invoke consensus among climate researches when he argues for jailing global warming skeptics. Agreeing with the crowd is important to Bill because he probably spend most of high school with his underwear rocket rammed up his rectum. History is full of stories of people being jailed for their beliefs. Bill often exclaims,

"Science rules!"

But what we know about science from recent history is that rather than ruling, science is often wrong. Before the advent of the personal computer, scientists at IBM believed that five super computers would run the world. Hewlett Packard had the rights to the personal computer, but they signed them over to Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak because they didn't think anyone would want a computer in their home. Prior to 1880, physicians didn’t believe in germs. Amputation saws weren’t sterilized during the Civil War. Not only did the science community not know how to treat basic wounds, their actions often led to life threatening infection. Disease was thought to have been spread by “bad air” and foul water. Scientist believed that infection propagated by “miasma” a poisonous bad smelling mist filled with particles from decomposing matter. At least by then they had stopped trying to balance the humors, which killed George Washington, who was bled to death by his barber to treat a soar throat.

When I was a kid, we learned in school that dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge eruption of a giant volcano. After scientists were unable to find a volcano large enough to snuff out most of the life on the planet, they switched to the asteroid impact theory. Scientists now believe dinosaurs had large multicolored feathers. So much for the depiction of the T-Rex running down Jeff Golblum in Jurassic Park. In ancient times, scientists erroneously believed that the earth was continuously increasing in size and that an undiscovered planet, called Vulcan, messed up Mercury’s orbit. They also said a fluid passed between objects rubbed together which explained the heat that was generated. It didn’t seem to bother them that objects contained an infinite amount of this fluid as you could keep generating heat indefinitely. Science is not always right, and consensus is not a measure of veracity. In fact, often the opposite is true.

This got me thinking about Bill Nye's actual education, namely his GPA. A guy stretching his credentials as far as he would certainly let his GPA slip out, especially if it was noteworthy. Since he was in school in the '70's, I would imagine he smoked a lot of pot while listening to Peter, Paul and Mary. So I went to the Cornell website where I found the frequently asked questions to which I submitted a straight up inquiry. As anticipated, that went nowhere.

Then I called the Registrar's Office at Cornell and spoke to a nice bot that directed me to the National Student Clearinghouse, the organization that handles such inquires. I opened a case by explaining that I was "an independent journalist" writing an article on Bill Nye. Hey, if he can call himself a scientist, I can call myself a journalist. I asked four things in my email.

1. Did Bill Nye graduate in 1977?
2. With a degree in mechanical engineering?
3. Was Carl Sagan one of his professors?
4. Was his GPA 3.61?

All of this is on the internet except his GPA, but I was hoping that someone new at the National Student Clearinghouse would inadvertently rifle off an answer to #4. Unfortunately my case worker wanted to know what I was going to do with all this information. I responded that I was a "freelance journalist" verifying information for an article. My caseworker told me, as I expected, they could only verify information a student used on a job application. So I responded with,

I didn't get a response. Maybe because I misspelled "Cornell." Undaunted, I decided to go directly to Bill himself. I found his email address online then sent him this,

I know "whose" should be "who's," but I find intelligencia often flame off an answer when they think someone is beneath their intellect. Like Bill Nye, I was an engineer for many years. To be equitable, my education and GPA can be found here.

In the end, I believe that people use the term “scientist” because they want to invoke credibility. We all know those religious folks are consummate nut jobs. They don’t believe in evolution, they don't want women to have abortions, and they think the earth is 4000 years old. Scientists know better because, well, they’re scientists. People listened to Stephen Hawkin, Carl Sagan, and Albert Einstein blather about anything because they were scientists so they had to be right. Hawkin once claimed the universe would eventually stop expanding and when it contracted, time would run backwards. Sagan often lamented about overpopulation in his books and television series, but he and his wife had five children. Einstein often used fudge factors he called "cosmological constants" to make his equations match reality. He also married his first cousin.

I once jokingly put down on an online profile for my life's ambition,

"To not learn anything new for the rest of my life, but if I have to learn something, let it come from TV."

Turns out I was wrong. Bill Nye is a successful showman, but when it comes to questions about science, I'd rather not be educated by a comedian on a television show.